Two views of times

Imagine that you spent your whole life at a single house.Each day at the same hour you entered an artificially-lit room,undressed and took up the same position in front of a motion picture camera.It photographed one frame of you per day,every day of your life. On your seventy-second birthday,the reel of film was shown.You saw yourself growing and aging over seventy-two years in less than half an hour (27.4 minites at sixteen frames per second). Images of this sort ,though terrifying, are helpful in suggesting unfamiliar¹ but useful perspectives of time. They may ,for example ,symbolize² the telescoped ,almost momentary³ charater of the past as seen through the eyes of an anxious or disa-ffected individual. Or they may suggest the remarkable⁴ brevity of our lifes in the cosmic scale of time. If the estimated age of the cosmos⁵ were shorted to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds.

 

But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor⁶ eternity⁷ of over 86000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular⁸ functions going on with the human body is comparable to the mumber of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely⁹ long or infinitely short.

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