#SoL15 Day 12/13: time to slice again

…yes, I missed a day, two actually since I just posted this 16 minutes after midnight EST. That's it. I've had it with running on someone else's clock.

Tuesday's nap was not enough to set me back on post-time-change course for Wednesday. Cursor freeze didn't help either. As with blogging, I should keep at it (napping) and just push through, so I has another one today. That still leaves a gap in the continuum where March 11 should be.

To restore balance and harmony in the blogiverse, I will seek out just the right something — graphic, fine art, video, Feghoot, or fabulation — for a  back-dated post to fill the void. But that's another post: call it "the slice that never was."

This one is turning into a reflection on time. The gap fill post will be probably be about time too but artifacts/illustrations. Neither will dwell on Ben Franklin's proverbial lost time like pennies spent not saved (except that you can't really save time, it passes no matter what. Time (if not timely) topics include perception, productivity, how spent or experienced, and literary tropes.

Both Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu and the medieval memento mori, each in its own way, are literary tropes about time -- one retrieving it, the other letting go of it. In "A new refutation of time," Borges tries to demonstrate that there is no time. In The Birth of Purgatory, French historian Jacques Le Goff (also author of Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages) identifies the emergence of the doctrine of purgatory "some time between 1170 and 1200" with clocks, measuring time and the rise of a mercantile system and transactions (spending time or money, paying debt)

Perception is another, from "Why Does Time Fly as We Age?" (Scientific American, 2013)

Two conclusions appear to ring true: 1.) While age is certainly a factor, the notion of
“time pressure” contributes significantly to our perception of time, across all age groups, and 2.) Time pressure is cross-cultural; the results of these studies were similar among the German, Austrian, Dutch, Japanese, and New Zealander participants.

See also:

• "Fast Time and the Aging Mind" (NYTimes, 2013). 
• "Scientists discover how to make time pass faster (or slower)" (Daily Mail, 2012)
• "The Possiblian" (New Yorker Magazine, 2011)

Yes, people spent time researching and writing about this. And now I am too.

I am participating in the March Slice of Life Challenge: blogging a slice a day for all of March.  Thank you, Two Writing Teachers! Visit the site to read some slices