Time itself, like the land, was unbanded

We mark down dashes in a ring and call it time, and when it doesn’t fit our schedules we fast-forward or rewind. Sometimes I catch myself wondering which time is the real one, and then I remember the question is flawed — the writing does not belong on the wall at all.

Harken back to the days before “high noon,” back to the days when stories began: “many moons ago.” It was not so very long ago here, just a few hundred years. Time itself, like the land, was unbanded. Who would think to mark such things? Time and space that run on like water.

Over the ages, society has wrung her communal hands over a series of technological shifts so seismic they tore apart and restitched the fabric of our lives. The latest culprits are smartphones and the internet; decades ago, it was TV. And centuries before that, the printing press. It occurs to me that there was a time when the idea of time itself was the corrupting force — when men gazed upon the first sundials and declared “this is the beginning of the end.” And so we come to the first revolution: the turning of a hand around a clock.