Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Part Four - Time

'If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.'--Albert Einstein, in New Statesman, 16 April 1965.

Time is a rhythm. It comes and goes like the crackle of electricity in the brain or the gush of blood through the heart or the flood of the tide up the beach. All these things are governed by cosmic clocks, and our measurements are nothing but bookkeeping conveniences. Seconds and minutes have nothing to do with nature. Every organism interprets the universal rhythms in its own way. A cattle tick may sit on the end of a twig for months waiting for a passing mammal; a larval cicada lives for years in the ground at the base of a tree waiting for conditions that will be exactly right for its one day of life as an adult. For them these periods pass as a single moment, of no more consequence in their lives than the interval between two of our heartbeats.

Manipulations of time can give us some idea of how little we understand these differences. A time-lapse film of bean shoots growing in the dark, with one frame exposed each hour, shows a scene of unbridled ferocity as each of the plants thrashes and claws at its neighbors in an attempt to get to the light. Slow-motion films of moths in flight show them picking up the sonar signal of an approaching bat, calculating its strength and source, and taking the appropriate avoiding action, all in the space of one tenth of a second. Each species lives in its own way and its own time, seeing only one section of the environment through the narrow slit of its own sense system. Real space and time exist outside of individual awareness.

In this section I want to relate some of the phenomena in our experience to the flow of time and to put the evolution of nature and Supernature into temporal perspective.

Next