Perception of time ...

 As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take the clock, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more and more mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To the Augustan period, and far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by the length of one’s shadow,20 although sun dials and water clocks, designed in conformity with a strict time reckoning and imposed by a deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.21 Classical man’s existence — Euclidean, relationless, point-formed — was wholly contained in the instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true Classical, archaeology did not exist, nor did its spiritual inversion, astrology. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman “haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing. No time reckoning entered intimately into everyday life (for the Olympiad sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really matters is not the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions “who uses it?” and “does the life of the nation run by it?” In Classical cities nothing suggested duration, or old times or times to come — there was no pious preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future generations; in them we do not find that durable22 material was deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenaean stone technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenaean and Egyptian work was before him and the country produced first class building stone. The Doric style is a timber style — even in Pausanias’s day some wooden columns still lingered in the Heraeum of Olympia. The real organ of history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of one’s personal past and of a national and a world historical past23 as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-personal becoming. That organ was not present in the makeup of a Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in this vague background; and the great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance — witness Caesar’s slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Caesar’s reform of the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the Classical life feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Caesar also imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State into an empire which was to be dynastic — marked with the badge of duration — and to have its center of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the Polis and the Urbs Roma.

Even then Classical mankind was still living every hour and every day for itself; and this is equally true whether we take the individual Greek or Roman, or the city, or the nation, or the whole Culture. The hot-blooded pageantry, palace orgies, circus battles of Nero or Caligula — Tacitus is a true Roman in describing only these and ignoring the smooth progress of life in the distant provinces — are final and flamboyant expressions of the Euclidean world feeling that deified the body and the present.

The Indians also have no sort of time reckoning (the absence of it in their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and therefore no history, no life memories, no care. What the conspicuously historical West calls “Indian history” achieved itself without the smallest consciousness of what it was doing.24 The millennium of the Indian Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was actually a dream. From all this our Western Culture is unimaginably remote. And, indeed, man has never — not even in the “contemporary” China of the Chôu period with its highly developed sense of eras and epochs — been so awake and aware, so deeply sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he has been in the West. Western history was willed and Indian history happened. In Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely counted, but here the hour, the minute, yea the second, is of importance. Of the tragic tension of a historical crisis like that of August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea.25 Such crises, too, a deep feeling man of the West can experience within himself, as a true Greek could never do. Over our countryside, day and night from thousands of belfries, ring the bells26 that join future to past and fuse the point moments of the Classical present into a grand relation. The epoch which marks the birth of our Culture — the time of the Saxon Emperors — marks also the discovery of the wheel clock.27 Without exact time measurement, without a chronology of becoming to correspond with his imperative need of archaeology (the preservation, excavation and collection of things-become), Western man is unthinkable. The  aroque age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies the individual.28

Spengler Decline of the West