Time-Musing on

One of the things that I found interesting in Ong's book was the idea of time not existing until the chirographic era. Now this was not the first time that I had been made aware of something like this, but it just struck me as how different our cultures and lives have become because of writing. "Early charters conveying land in England were originally not even dated" (Ong 96). This was suggested to be true because people at that time were not inundated with time. The people would have no idea what calendar year it was, because when do you take time from, the cruxification, the creation of the world, the birth of Christ, and "was it presumptuious to date a secular document as Popes dated theirs?" (Ong 96). In our high tech lifestyle, their is not getting away from the clock or the issue of time. As soon as I wake up in the morning the first thing I try to determine is what time is it, if I don't have my alarm clock already set, this will tell me if how much more time I have to sleep, do I need to get up and start working on that paper that is due in 5 hours, etc. Yes I am a total prograstinator. This is a society without newspapers, and time would seem inconsequential, which is what grabbed my attention in the first place. Just as writing has become a technology that we cannot survive without, so has the idea of time. I cannot even pathom a world without deadlines, alarms, and time always pushing in. I remember about 8 years ago, I decided that I was sick of being a slave to time, and that I was no longer going to allow it to control my life. I stopped wearing a watch, and yet in a way it made me more a slave to time, becasue although I may not know what time it is, it was still pushing on and controlling me. I needed to know the time to be to work on time, or I would have no job, and no food or housing. I also needed to know the time because I needed to know when the bus left so that I could make it to that job. Plus appointments, etc, I may not have wanted time, but it sure wanted me. I became adept at reading other people's watches on the bus, in casual environments, etc. I still don't wear a watch, and am still completely preoccupied with time, so don't get alarmed if you see me staring at your writst, I don't have some weird fetish, unless it is with time. And if you look to literature time is a big topic. Just off the top of my head I can think of Mrs. Dalloway, which time is ticking away, and she feels she needs to have one more great party, to make the lives of her guests beautiful one more time, Tom Robbins investigates time in many of his novels, the one I am thinking about is Jitterbug Perfume, I know Borges also looks at time and memory, and I am sure if I were to really think I could come up with many more, so time is always on our brains. I mean we have websites which will tell us when we will die, I mean how much more consumed, or obsessessed can we be with time. Yet I understand that it was not a utopian free for all without time. The oral cultures had their ways of determining the time of year, and this was the seasons. In their highly agricultural lifestyles this type of time keeping helped to tell them when to plant, to harvest, etc, and as Kane points out also helped to determine the activities of the season. As he stated in Chapter 5, the winter season was a time for telling of stories, rememberance, reflect on the legends and thier ancestors. So to say that the oral culture was without time would be false, yet I think that it would be fair to say that they are not obessed with time in the way our society is. And really it is all just arbitrary, I mean the same questions that confounded the oral cultures about dating their documents still exists today, what is our time based on? I know it has something to do with the calculated seasons, etc, but really isn't it all just a technology, a creation, like writing. A way to try and make sense of a unsensible world, a bunch of random symbols that we have propagandaed into everyone minds? I don't know, but I think I would have liked to live a couple of days in this oral culture to see what it would feel like not always to have a clock ticking over my head.