My first year of grad school, one of my professors and I had a discussion about time. Being sociologists, we talked about how time is entirely socially constructed, how we could never get our students to quite understand/accept that, and then he asked me how I thought about time. Did I picture time as a circle or a straight line?
Straight line.
He thought of it as a circle, and we then turned to possible explanations. His idea was that people with significant life experiences outside of cities/metro areas are more likely to think of time as a circle. Farmers, especially, would think of time as cyclical, as their lives, both day to day and year to year, consisted of the same rotation of events.
What do you think? HOW do you think: straight or circular?
1 comment:
I read a great book in college called "The Myth of the Eternal Return" by Mircea Eliade. He says it's a spiral--moving forward but looping back on itself. I really like that one.
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