Time Lord (eBook)

The Discovery of TimeAn obvious question demands to be answered from the outset: Can anyone have a definition of time? Time is invisible and indescribable, endlessly fascinating and universally compelling. Time is everywhere, thus nowhere. It animates the world, yet nothing survives it. We can only guess how it started, or when it will end. It is our intimate assassin. One thing it lacks, however, except in Greek myth, is a compelling narrative. Natural time?the time of the gods, the sun and the moon?starts in a savage, glorious myth and ends on an Irish railway platform in 1876, when Sandford Fleming missed his train. Originally, Time was embodied in a god, Uranus. He ruled over an immutable world. His children were the seven visible planets. Acting on a prophecy that his life was in danger from one of them, Uranus did the natural thing and slaughtered them all. Their mother, his sister Gaia, was able to hide one son, Kronos. Kronos, upon maturity, did the natural thing?castrated and killed his father. He married his sister, Rhea. When he learned of a plot against him, he cannibalized his children, but for Zeus, whose sleeping body Rhea had replaced with a stone. Zeus, of course, would castrate and kill his father. Time is a bloodthirsty savage. None of us gets out alive, regardless of piety, decency, beauty, or innocence. But Zeus, at least, made it tolerable by setting the clock of mortality and mutability. We die, but we are replaced. Our children do supplant us, and they bury us. They can't admit it, but they want their parents dead. And parents can't admit it, but they want their children forever helpless and dependent. So long as they remain babies, we stay in our virile prime. Their maturing is our death. Mutability saves us from unthinkable violence, at the cost of our own life. I can't imagine a more ethically charged dilemma. The powers of Time were scattered. Different gods attended to prophecy, history, fate, and dreams. Priestly castes learned the natural periodicities of the days, months, and years and determined rituals and sacrifices required for harvests, protection from floods, and return of the rains. Natural time is cyclical, a closed system, not admitting to change. Gods of the natural world are mysterious, unknowable, and violent. Any variation in worship might-or might not-bring instant death. The collapse of 'natural' thinking was most sudden, and most dramatic, in England. It was in England that the Romantic embrace of nature reached doctrinal intensity, where rambles in the Lake District inspired poetry, where the great and permanent forms of nature were invoked as guides in time of crisis and despair. One thinks of nature?s power not only to soothe but to inspire reveries of timelessness, as in Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1818). But England soon embraced the Industrial Revolution with even deeper fervor, so that within little more than a generation, the nation had been transformed into a virtual laboratory for creative destruction. Thirty years after Keats's ode, in The Communist Manifesto, time became cheaper than sand, not dearer than gold, a servant, not a master. It could be leased back to an employer at a fair rate and for a set duration, or even confiscated by the proposed new state on the behalf of labor. The social structure and the political order were transformed, but not by Marx and Engels. The revolutionary agent was speed, the new velocity introduced by trains and the telegraph. If industrialism and rationality teach anything, it is that nothing is permanent, especially nothing found in nature. There is no 'natural' law. Displaying gratitude for the gods' gift of time became less important than...