Memories of the 28th Century
The Perception of Time
by , 12-23-2012 at 03:22 PM (5160 Views)
I just finished reading Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and I was struck by the attitude that he had toward time. Then I remembered that my mother had a similar attitude, and so do many of the people that I have encountered. That attitude is that they felt that they were very old, and that things in their lives happened a long, long time ago. I previously had the impression that people developed a longer view of things as they matured. It makes sense that little children would think that anything that happened before they were born happened a long, long time ago, but they would learn that their parents and other relatives may have lived back then, so it couldn't be all that long ago. And as time passed that view would extend to even earlier times. I have found that I consider anything since the fall of Rome to be fairly recent. I don't know anyone who was alive then, but I can imagine the times and events. Sometimes I stretch a little and remember that Babylon throve not long before that, so maybe recent times go back to 3000 BCE. Part of the reason why Olden Days seem recent to me is that I am comfortable with history and feel that I have a good idea of how people and things were then, while many people think that it was unfathomably different. There are even some people who think that people didn't have a sense of individuality until quite recently.
That strange idea is held by a fair number of people in academia, especially ones who never bothered paying attention to history and literature. Perhaps people are getting the idea to the past was so different from those academics. If one reads ancient literature carefully, then one will realize that people thought and acted the same three or four thousand years ago as they think and act now.
Then too, time, or the perception of time, is variable. "Time flies when you're having fun." This is a common perception that most people have at least some of the time. And there are things that seem to take forever. Such perceptions seem to be quite individual. Then there was the time when I met someone who I hadn't seen in about fifteen years, and I said, "Ir's been a while." He replied, "Yeah, a long while." To which I said, "No, not that long, just a few weeks." I could remember our last encounter as if it had happened a few days earlier. I take this to mean that perception of personal time is partly based on memory.
I don't know, but I suspect that one's understanding of the past and feeling of how distant it is depends largely on how clearly one recalls or understands. People who know nothing of the past would find it impossibly distant, outside their understanding, while someone who knows history reasonably well and feels comfortable with it would regard the past as things that happened in the knowable yesterdays, rather than in some unimaginably distant time.
How do other people perceive the past? Was Julius Caesar's murder something that felt like yesterday's news when you heard of it, or was it something that happened in a different world? Can you imagine sitting down and having a comfortable conversation over dinner with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and a few others of that era? .
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