in celebration of T I M E or our time fiction

We are running by the clock every hour - especially on New Year's eve - but time is nothing innate or obviously understood. We grew up with a given divsion of our time that we learned not to question, at school, later at work. Even in our leisure time we tend to go by the pace of the clock, rather than our own rhythm, sometimes called circadian rhythm. Today i remembered a book called Time and the Other by Johannes Fabian. The book is a critique of the anthropological discipline but i'm selecting only one of many of the author's points.

Fabian puts Time into perspective: it is Time that enables us to relate to other people, close or far away from ourselves. Our relationships are in-time and our knowledge of others is "also a temporal, historical, a political act."  There is the Judeo-Christian linear versus a cyclical view of Time in other belief systems according to Fabian. The attempt to universalise a common view of Time also ended up de-sacralising and modernizing the thinking of Time. He reminds us of the origins of the term epoch, a historical counting unit. The Greek root of epoch means "a point at which one stops the journey through Time "to consider as from a place of rest, all that happened before or after, so that one may avoid anachronisms, that is, a kind of error which results in confusing the times" . In other words, time units are arbitrary tools. Those time units can bring others closer or keep them apart...it can affect the way we think of another person or group, if we think "linear".

Time and space became intrinsically linked together. In scientific fashion both were universalised in the Prime Meridian and Universal Time, starting from the heart of Greenwich, England. In 1967 time measurement was rectified to lost seconds per year and renamed into Universal Co-ordinated Time. By nations agreeing to this time standard, we are given a tool to measure each other and the universe. 

Time broadly marks our beliefs. It would be good to remain aware of the arbitrariness of our epoch's time.

(To be continued ... when i have "more universal time" or in "my own time", hours or days later...)