Posted by Someone Else at 2:08pm Mar 30 '10It's the most common view in our society that time is linear. Most people just kind of accept that without ever questioning it. One moment happens, then the next, then the next, and so on for infinity. Just like the time lines we all probably made in school.
There's a local poet, Derek Burleson, who spoke in a class I was in when I was 14 or so. He talked about Ejo, which is a Kinyarwandan word that means both yesterday and tomorrow. He had spent some time in Rwanda, and had learned about their concept of time, in which it's more like a circle with a dot in the middle--that dot being today and the circle being everything else. It was my first exposure to the idea of other ways to perceive time, and while it was hard to wrap my brain around that when time is something I simply took for granted, it actually made a lot of sense to me.
Later, I read Slaughterhouse V, by [private] Vonnegut. In it, there's an alien species called the Tralfamadorians, and they can perceive all of time at once. It's explained as being like a mountain range--it's all there. This view of time made even more sense to me, though the analogy never quite hit home with me...with the way we perceive time, I think it makes sense to think of it like a deck of cards. It's all there, but our perception is blocked by the present moment. As you flip the top card to the back of the deck, you know what that card was from your memory, but you can no longer actually see it--exactly the same as when today passes to yesterday.
There's a local poet, Derek Burleson, who spoke in a class I was in when I was 14 or so. He talked about Ejo, which is a Kinyarwandan word that means both yesterday and tomorrow. He had spent some time in Rwanda, and had learned about their concept of time, in which it's more like a circle with a dot in the middle--that dot being today and the circle being everything else. It was my first exposure to the idea of other ways to perceive time, and while it was hard to wrap my brain around that when time is something I simply took for granted, it actually made a lot of sense to me.
Later, I read Slaughterhouse V, by [private] Vonnegut. In it, there's an alien species called the Tralfamadorians, and they can perceive all of time at once. It's explained as being like a mountain range--it's all there. This view of time made even more sense to me, though the analogy never quite hit home with me...with the way we perceive time, I think it makes sense to think of it like a deck of cards. It's all there, but our perception is blocked by the present moment. As you flip the top card to the back of the deck, you know what that card was from your memory, but you can no longer actually see it--exactly the same as when today passes to yesterday.
Time - Someone Else