365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Monday, January 1, 2024
Arbitrary Constructs
Day 80: The New Year has come 'round...or has it? The equivalent of "New Year's Day" is celebrated on widely disparate days by different cultures depending on their calendars which, after all, are social constructs in and of themselves. Time is an artificial construct as far as its measurement goes, and again, not all cultures regard it in the same manner as we do. We have created devices for determining time (or rather, duration), scientifically ticking off the increments with atomic regularity, but anyone waiting for a bus in the rain can confirm that some minutes are substantially longer than others. Time is relative, in more ways than Albert Einstein was able to quantify. A month in a child's life is an eternity; an octogenarian remarks on how quickly it passed. Perhaps that is what Salvador Dali was intending to suggest with his limp watches in "The Persistence of Memory," that time, the flexible, distorted rigor by which the bulk of us manage our lives and attempt to govern the lives of others, is not as fixed as we wish to make it.
Labels:
"Persistence of Memory",
limp watch,
time
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