Time

I'm helping beta-read a novel, and one aspect of it headed me down a rabbit hole about time, to a 31-year-old paper presented to the NCTE about "Indian time." "Indian time" is mythic, based on appropriateness of action ("I eat when I'm hungry, I drink when I'm dry, and if whiskey don't kill me I'll live til I die."), while "linear time" contributes to dislocation and illness. As is typical, the author cites special relativity without showing the remotest understanding of it.

The problems attributed to "linear time" and "technology" are curable with "mythic time" and simplicity, of course. Patton seems to be unacquainted with Christian traditions about materialism. And Mander's comparison tables, cited in the Appendix, are not just invidious but inaccurate. Some tribes did in fact work to produce surplus for trade, and trade networks could be extensive.

You can tell that the paper is old; it doesn't try to attribute wickedness to whites, just to "technology." It probably would run into a lot of flack today.

At any rate, I didn't find what I was hunting: anything like the (surprisingly late!) idea of returning to the past. Stories of one-way time travel to the future are very old.

Of course, after making a bit of fun of the paper, I need to give an example of what she means. When I lived in Liberia, people referred to Liberian Standard Time, which in practice meant "whenever:" Maybe half an hour after the hour specificed, maybe the next day. Things happened, and meetings ran long, and part of business was maintaining relationships. And land line telephones weren't that common. When I returned, cell phones were ubiquitous, and often interrupted things. It seemed that the rule that "a meeting lasts as long as it lasts" was now something of an exception. Was maintaining relations still such a large part of business? I wasn't there long enough to find out.