Our experience of time is indivisible from our experience of living. Two recent sources indicate how thoroughly intertwined our notions of time are with our other perceptions, and how therefore they can be intentionally reshaped by others working on our perceptions (so to speak, from time to time).

Thanks to information designer and friend Stuart Silverstone, in Santa Monica, for turning me on to “A Timeline of Timelines,” featured in Cabinet Magazine Online. Authors Cabinet associate editor Sasha Archibald and University of Oregon history professor Daniel Rosenberg, Timeline features snippets describing timelines created over the last 1,700 years, beginning with Jewish scholar ben Halafta's calculations of the earth's history in the 2nd Century CE, but really taking off with the first “modern” timeline by physicist Joseph Priestly in 1765. The article contains numerous graphics that illustrate the almost infinite ways by which people can conceive of and represent time and history, and persuade others to think alike. In his introduction to an earlier, shorter version, Rosenberg explains;

...Priestley argues that although time in itself is an abstraction that may not be “the object of any of our senses, and no image can properly be made of it, yet because it has a relation to quantity, and we can say a greater or less space of time, it admits of a natural and easy representation in our minds by the idea of a measurable space, and particularly that of a LINE.”

After Priestley, the form of the timeline caught on. In addition to its visual effectiveness, the timeline amplified conceptions of historical progress that were becoming popular at the time. The relationship was mutually reinforcing. As Priestley himself suggests, the timeline filled in as a kind of fantasized visual referent for an object without material substance. In its simplest form, it appeared to guarantee the simplicity and directionality of past and future history. But Priestley's commentary points to a problem too. History had never actually taken the form of a timeline or of any other line for that matter. And simplicity, the great advantage of the form, threatened also to be its greatest flaw. The timeline could function as “the most excellent mechanical help to the knowledge of history” because it could impress the imagination “indelibly.” For the same reason, a century later, Henri Bergson would refer to the “imaginary homogeneous time” depicted by the timeline as a deceiving “idol.”

Messing with our experience of time can happen through less visible, but even more fundamental means -- by controlling the clocks, specifically the atomic clocks that now keep world time. In “Clash of the Time Lords,” in the current (December) Harper's (not yet online), Michelle Stacey explains why the usurpation of responsibility for telling the time, formerly the domain of astronomers observing objects in the sky, by physicists who measure the decay of radioactive matter, has radically reshaped our concept and actual measurement of time. A corollary is that the United States, which owns the most atomic clocks, is able to formally nominate its own US Naval Observatory to be the world authority on time for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the UN entity that defines the UTC Time Scale that controls all telecommunications, all telecom-dependent activities, and thus all of our lives.