The clock on the wall measures the rotation of a planet, the oscillation of a caesium atom, the winding down of a spring. It does not measure experience. A year in a waiting room and a year inside a love affair occupy the same calendar space but bear no resemblance to each other in the body. A child’s summer afternoon stretches to the horizon; a dying person’s final hour collapses like wet paper. What we call time is, in this sense, a shared agreement, a grid we have overlaid on the continuous flux of existence so that trains can run and harvests can be planned. Remove the clock, the calendar, the appointment, and what remains is not time but pure sensation: the warmth of light shifting across a floor, hunger arriving, sleep pulling at the edges of thought. The mystics, the physicists, and music iconoclast Prince all arrived at the same uncomfortable threshold. If consciousness stops, does time continue? If no mind is present to register the interval between one moment and the next, is there an interval at all? The construct may be indispensable, the way a ruler is indispensable when you are building a house. But the ruler does not exist in the forest. The house does not exist yet. Only the wood is real, and the wood does not know what an inch is.
