time
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“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.
Neil Postman -
On past, present, and future. — My friend, do think of the past in terms of those memories of events and accomplishments which were pleasant, rewarding, and satisfying. The present? Well, think of it in terms of challenges and opportunities, and the rewards available for the application of your talents and energies. As for the future, that is a time and a place where every worthy ambition you possess is within your grasp.
Bruce Lee -
We are, to use his (Editor: Korzybski) phrase, “time-binders”, while plants are “chemistry-binders”, and animals are “space-binders”. Chemistry-binding is the capacity to transform sunlight into organic chemical energy; space-binding, the capacity to move about and control a physical environment. Human have these capacities, too, but are unique in their ability to transport their experience through time. As time binders, we can accumulate knowledge from the past and communicate what we know to the future.
Neil Postman -
Our principle means of accomplishing binding of time is symbol. But our capacity to symbolize is dependent upon and integral to another process, which Korzybski called “abstracting”. Abstracting is the continuous activity of selecting, omitting, and organizing the details of reality so that we experience the world as patterned and coherent. Korzybski shared with Heraclitus the assumption that the world is undergoing continuous change and that no two events are identical. We give stability to to our world only through our capacity to re-create it by ignoring differences and attending to similarities: although we know that we cannot step into the “same” river twice, abstracting allows us to act as if we can.
Neil Postman -
Nature’s time, thought of as linear, was more or less encompassed by the formula of evolution: the passage from inanimate matter to the first vertebrates, to fish, birds, animals, and at last to man, was progressive. As the natural sciences developed, the line was extended even further to the history of human societies. Here, too, there was to be constant progress, but until Marx there were no guarantees beyond rather vague faith.
Czesław Miłosz -
.. I genuinely believe that the absolutely fundamental difference between the European tradition and other cultures lies in the different notions of time and that it is fundamental source of the European idea of development and progress. Other cultures, on the contrary, honor the status quo, quietude, leaving things in place, etc., etc.
Václav Havel
