The enigma of time

Elliott Jaques

pp. 21-34

in: John Hassard (ed), The sociology of time, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

The enigma of time is the enigma of life: it has plagued poets and philosophers from the beginnings of civilised thought. For life is lived in time. Without time there is no life. But each one lives in his own time. No two men living at the same time live in the same time. Each one, living at the same moment, has his own personal time perspective, his own living linkage with past and future, the content of which, and the scale of which, are as different between one person and another as are their appearance, their fingerprints, their characters, their desires, their very being.