Time is many different concepts and ideas; it is change, it is movement, it is sequentiality. Of two ways of looking at the universe, we in the West seem to be attempting either to seek a singular order that we already have faith exists in the universe (we need only to uncover it), or to create an order out of all that we perceive and all that happens to us. Whether it exists or whether we make it up, order is something we cannot live without: at least it is natural for us to want to live in such a world than in one that is purely chaotic. If there is a single motive to characterize why we keep time, that motive must surely be the search for order.
The first view—that the order is already there—is widely held among modern scientists, while the second is more in line with the way humanists tend to look at the world. So far as our time reckoning originates, as I have demonstrated, in the simple inborn rhythms of nature the scientist is correct: the calendar is already in us. But the humanist is correct, too, for in the past 3,000 years, we have taken time outside of ourselves. We have made our own expressions of it—in poetry and song, with hammer and chisel. We have framed it in tiny blocks and hung it on a wall. We have linearized and circularized it, endowed it with a quality of irreversibility, even artif icialized it by wrapping it around our wrists, and exalted it in the turrets of our religious buildings.
World History
