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    A Walk in the Garden of Time
    A Walk in the Garden of Time
    A Walk in the Garden of Time
    Ebook105 pages2 hours

    A Walk in the Garden of Time

    By John Tierney

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    About this ebook

    We don't think about time much, do we?

    Time surrounds us. We can't think about it any more than a fish can imagine the water around him.

    Einstein said time is an illusion. Henri Bergson see it as "duration", a natural flow. A Buddhist would see a circle, a priest as eternity's antechamber, a historian a history of human development and decay.

    It's all these things and more. In this book, I distinguish between chronological, personal and circular approaches to time. There is a large gap between our relentlessly chronological views of it and the non-European perception of time, a fact which leads to much misunderstanding and miscommunication. Part of it is the imprecision of our own speech, part of it is simply, due to the separate evolution of world cultures.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateSep 1, 2013
    ISBN9781483506081
    A Walk in the Garden of Time
    Author

    John Tierney

    John Tierney is interested in the work of Oswald Spengler and how it relates to the modern West. Is the West in terminal decline?

    Read more from John Tierney

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      Book preview

      A Walk in the Garden of Time - John Tierney

      gets.

      Chapter 1

      The Kinds of Time.

      Other linguists have echoed the same concept:

      Concepts of time and matter are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed.¹

      Here’s another reference, another linguist, concerning the role of language in shaping our thoughts:

      Human beings are...very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society...We see and hear and otherwise experience largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation .²

      So, what's our concept of time? Our experience, our habit, our predisposition?

      In Western culture, in Western languages, time's a straight line. We stand at a single point, imagining we're at a place on a riverbank and a stream is passing us by. To our left is the past. There is a verb tense in our language with which to discuss time past, and we depend on memory for much of our information. Where memory fails, there are books. For time present there's personal experience, newspapers, conversation, and gossip. It can't all be true, it flies by too rapidly to verify it all, but it is all part of us.

      To our right is the future. There's a verb tense for it, too. We assume it will happen because it always has; we derive our ideas of the future from time present and time past without thinking much about it. Next year’s cars will be different. We’ll all be a year older. Etc.

      There's always been a future. Yes, the future hasn’t happened yet and is changeable, just as events in the other two time frames aren’t. Still, we don’t generally think of things that way. Something in us wants to believe the future will be a lot like the past----a little bit better, hopefully, but not too much different, certainly not challengingly so. It would be too upsetting. History belongs to someone else; we’re into change which is less than err, historic. We read horoscopes in our newspapers, all of which suggest only minor changes. We make straight-line projections; money is good. Therefore, we play the lottery. If money is good, more money must be better.

      The future gives us an emotional need for cognitive dissidence; the future is a dangerous, unpredictable land where bad things can happen, things for which we cannot prepare ourselves. We build quiet, non-stressful alternatives in our minds to keep from going mad.

      Can we remember how Greeks believed in the Time of the Titans how all men could foresee the future? Zeus, as a kindness, took that away from them. Only a few remained clairvoyant. Like Cassandra, whose curse was not to have others believe what she said, they typically suffered from their foreknowledge.

      Our view of time is called "chronological after the old Greek god of time, Chronos. It prevails throughout Europe and in countries where the principal language is derived from a European one. While there are important differences within this group, too, it’s still all spatialized, in that time is still regarded as a place. That is, I lost my ball in the park and I lost my ball last week" are two basically different concepts. Our language and our culture makes no distinction between the two of them.

      This view of time is particularly Greek, and is based in the Greek language:

      It is the Verbs not the Nouns which are the core of Greek writing, even Greek thinking and perceiving. Greek unlike modern English and Medieval Latin which are noun-languages and stolidly satisfied with lists of things, to the detriment of motion in Style as an art. Greek swings on its Verbs and the Verbal Classes are much harder to grasp than the Nouns.³

      Greek, at least, has several future tenses; most languages don't have any. As with verb-centered languages, it's more difficult to learn. The Greek view of time prevails in Europe, in northern India, and among languages coming from these places. The existence of verb tenses is a marker, and conversations in these languages require us to set the scene in conversation within our basic speech pattern, using basic verb

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