ABSTRACT
Time as a subject has spawned a massive and inchoate literature. There seem to be as many concepts of time and varieties of time awareness as there are aspects of love, few of them historically specific (whatever their expositors may claim).1 It may be useful, however, to offer as reference points two opposite concepts of time current in our period: natural time, and Newtonian time, if only to illustrate by contrast the greater complexity of reality. The eighteenth-century “ploughman poet” Stephen Duck expressed in verse the idea of natural time:
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Natural time could be defined as a sense of change that arose from events in the natural world. It was cyclical, based on awareness of constant renewal and death against an essentially unchanging natural background.
