ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the role of vision in making time explicit. The contribution of vision to time sense is not confined to temporal depth. It also underpins temporal breadth, the sense of a spread out 'now' of synchronous happenings. The intersections of our paths, meetings and assemblies are coordinated in a visible time, that is to say a public time, which lies outside our bodies, our breathing and the beating of our heart. Eventually we come to inhabit a fine-grained mesh of tabled, extra-corporeal, public time. The representation of time as a quantity of space sets a path that has ultimately led to the notion of time as a quasi-spatial quantity as a dimension analogous to those of space. Physical time, lacks many characteristics of lived time, notably the difference between an anticipated future and a regretted past, the sense of that which we can change and the feeling of that which is done and dusted, immutable.
