march of time >> by gail kavanagh >> *spark-online issue ten

I am certain one day people will look back on our enlightened age and conclude that we were an ignorant and deluded bunch of savages--much as we look back on the Middle Ages today. I actually had this blinding revelation while I was coming home from work, during one of those consciousness shifts when the perfectly normal is exposed in all its demented reality.

The train pulled in at the station and I paused to let the throng of passengers get ahead of me. Too tired to try and beat them to the stairs, I hung back and watched. Ignoring each other as if they were deadly enemies, yet bonded shoulder-to-shoulder closer than most family units, the passenger pack surged relentlessly up the stairs.

Bangbangbang...their feet pounded a soul-less rhythm from step to step. Behind me the doors closed, the train moved on. I looked at my watch, a natural thing to do, and then my brain lit up. Two millennia ago, even two centuries ago, I would not have done that. I would not have had a watch to look at. The hour, the year, probably even the century would have been unknown to me. I'm not one of those people who thinks they were Queen Elizabeth I or Cleopatra in a former life. My status would have been fairly low. I'd have known what season it was, known when to get up with the sun, when to pray and plow, and plant by the seasons and the moon.

We are obsessed with time. We do everything at the same time. Aberrations like daylight-saving time and different time zones provide no real exception to the rule. While we are waiting in our sleep on one side of the planet for the alarm to go off, our daily schedule is frantically being re-enacted on the other side. Around the western world, we march to the beat of that ticking metronome.

Around the middle of the last millennium, people started to become aware of history as chapters in a book of time. Now we have shortened those chapters to decades or less-the '70s, '80s, '90s--and the biggest question on the eve of the 21st Century was not "What if we don't make it?" but "What shall we call the zeros?"

It is as if time is chopped up into unrelated chunks and no longer part of a seamless whole of human evolution and development. We cannot figure anything out at all unless we have a tag for it. We give the years names, we break the year up into special days and weeks so we know where we are, what to listen to, what to sell. The universe is huge, chaotic and un-signposted, so we signpost like crazy. The year is pocked with dates: Christmas, Mother's Day, Easter, Red This Day, White That Week Today I saw date-expired Easter eggs for sale. Must be left over from last year. No one seems to envisage a future different from today, but it will happen. A time will come when the year will pass without these celebratory punctuation marks, when tinsel and Easter eggs will be kept in museums and clocks on train stations will gather dust. Our obsession with time will become archaic and amusing. Who knows what time it is in the universe? Will spacefarers really still be telling the time by GMT?

Or will we have learned to flow with the rhythm of time again? Knowing, of course, that nature keeps its own record of history, and throws in a period every now and then by extinguishing all life on the planet. Now that's the way to end a chapter! Makes our nervous little semicolons almost pointless.