I’m increasingly convinced the ancients did not think of, or experience, time the way we do, as a kind of one-way street spatial dimension. It was a flux with a material quality. Like a river flowing through you. Or like weather.
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I don’t think it was a metaphor to the ancients the way it is to us, it was more viscerally felt the way weather is felt
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For a pre-industrialized look, Schivelbusch's industrialization of time and space.
jstor.org/stable/10.1525
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Not just the ancients, I’m pretty sure I experienced time more like this before age 18 or so. Or maybe that impression is just an artifact of the structure of memory.
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Perception is a slippery thing. It makes sense that dimensions are only perceived in relative terms, and therefore dependent on what comparisons you have available. The idea of a clock that ticks the same speed everywhere creates a new point of reference.





