The world as we really know it dates back to the Industrial Revolution. The world as we really know it dates back to the Renaissance. And within those twelve thousand years of civilization time is not uniform. Three hundred and twenty is a large number, but not in the way that six hundred million is a large number, not inscrutably large. Three hundred and twenty generations ago, Jericho was a walled city of three thousand souls. From the work of archeologists and from accounts like those in the Bible I have some sense of daily life at least as far back as the time of the Pharaohs, which is almost half the way. And I can conceive of how most of those forebears lived. A skilled genealogist could easily get me one fiftieth of the distance back. That is, I can think back one-ninety-sixth of the way to the start of civilization. Sitting here at my desk, I can think back five generations-I have photographs of four. Using twenty-five years as a generation, that is four hundred and eighty generations ago. People began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some twelve thousand years ago. This idea about time is essentially misleading, for the world as we know it, the world with human beings formed into some sort of civilization, is of quite comprehensible duration. Change takes unimaginable-“geologic”-time. Since even a million years is utterly unfathomable, the message is: Nothing happens quickly. The dinosaurs lived for a hundred and fifty million years. The age of the trilobites began six hundred million years ago. Our mountains have been pulverized by a process almost as slow.” We have been told that man’s tenure is as a minute to the earth’s day, but it is that vast day that has lodged in our minds. “The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying that when the Himalayas have been ground to powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity will only have just begun. “So slowly, oh, so slowly, have the great changes been brought about,” John Burroughs wrote in 1912. At least since Darwin, nature writers have taken pains to stress the incomprehensible length of this path. It moves with infinite slowness through the many periods of its history, whose names we can dimly recall from high-school biology-the Cambrian, the Devonian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene.
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