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But what is a civilization to do when it discovers that time also thinks like James Joyce, or worse? Time goes in for wildly irrational effects. It is kinetic and plastic and malleable. Greenwich mean time, described as universal tune, is infinitesimalry parochial. Science fiction at its most routine will have time split and bent, laminated, turned back until it flows uphill and billiard balls leap out of their pockets and astronauts turn up as infants in King Arthur's court. In Freudian time, an apparent trifle from the distant past can go monstering through the skull and hold it hostage. As Einstein knew, God is subjective and moody about time. He and human history keep time in unpredictable, discontinuous ways.
Different societies inhabit different times, for example, different zones of history. The sweet Tasaday tribesmen of the Philippines lived in a peaceful Stone Age dream until anthropologists and TV crews descended on them. The Ayatullah Khomeini's Iran, or much of it, spends its days in the 16th century. The late Shah's fatal error may have been that, among other things, he attempted to accelerate Iranian time; he disturbed the Shi'ite nest and pace in history. Nations, like individuals, have their natural locations in time, and such placements often have nothing to do with the calendar.
The year of Our Lord that we inhabit is inescapable, of course, in the same sense that time is ultimately and literally unendurable: we all must die in it at last. But we also seem to exercise an amazing psychological and cultural discretion about the kind of time we inhabit. Menachem Begin's epoch, for example, is essentially biblical; ancient events in Judea, as far as he is concerned, occurred the day before yesterday.
Perhaps time is ultimately a matter of metabolism. It slows and speeds according to the agitations of consciousness that occur therein. A man or a society can be frozen until science discovers a cure for its illness: cultural cryonics. Spengler wrote of a time when "high history lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, clinging to the soil, dumb and enduring."
Britain has not yet subsided into a peasant stupor. But it is a retrospective society. On gray, rainy afternoons, it still dreams of empire. The Falklands crisis called forth all kinds of wistful Churchillian rhetoric, a whiff of the grapeshot gusting through the letters column of the Times. The star may be long dead, but the light from it persists in space: a pure idea, a memory.
The Rumanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade some years ago proposed a theory of sacred and profane time among primitive peoples. In Eliade's formula, profane time means the quotidian rounds of life, the business of eating and sleeping and working and birthing and dying. Profane time is essentially meaningless. Sacred time is ritual time, the brief transcendence through festival, life mythologized and sanctified in ceremony. Sacred time consists of those rites in which a people re-enact the holy, aboriginal events of their culture: a sacrifice, for example. The escape into sacred time means immortality, a rescue in any case from the meaningless.