The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

(Reprise from the pace-layering Chapter 7: “Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes.”)

To me the Clock and the Library capture two different aspects of time. The Clock is Newtonian time, physical time—reversible, regular, steady. The Library is information time. It points in a direction, it grows, it’s unpredictable. One of the fundamental mysteries of the universe to me is how one kind of time can be made out of the other—how inform

encourage visitors to contribute silence: Quiet music stops people talking. It makes people aware that they may be intruding on

Eternity is the opposite of a long time. In

Religious time is time out. Time out from personal striving or suffering, time out from the chaos of history. In the sacred place set apart, in the sacred ritual changeless and timeless, in the sacred communion with a higher order, we step out of ordinary time and thereby make life meaningful, or at least bearable.

Of all cultural practices, religion is the greatest sustainer and most durable of institutions.

When we disturb nature at its own scale—as with our “extinction engine” and greenhouse gases of recent times—we risk triggering apocalyptic forces. Like it or not, we now have to comprehend and engage the still Longer Now of nature.

Culture is where the Long Now operates. Culture’s vast slow-motion dance keeps century and millennium time.

The social sector acts on culture-level concerns in the domain of governance.