Free Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney

things on the earth exist in the same “now” as we do. You could argue that starfish and plants exist in a “now” with alonger wavelength than ours; their purposeful movements can only be seen with time-lapse photography. Conversely some insects and pygmy marmosets seem to exist in a faster, narrower “now.” Computers, though not yet conscious or living beings, operate in an even briefer “now,” just nanoseconds long. But these are the fine-grained “nows,” like the fast end of my Olympic time clock. In the other direction, “now” is coarse.
    When politicians or historians say “now,” they often mean the current period, the “way certain things are” presently. That “now” is not as brief as the personal and universal “now,” the vanishing trace that skims from past to future like a cursor carrying our awareness along with it. The cultural “now” can be much larger, a decade or longer, yet it is still correct to call it now. In that sense “now” can encompass centuries, even millennia.
    In geological terms, “now” is very precisely located. It is nested within an increasingly bigger series of well-defined time periods. “Now” in geological terms is defined as the Holocene epoch, which began about eleven thousand years ago, while humans were still in the hunter-gatherer stage. The Holocene epoch is itself part of the Quaternary period, which started two million years ago. And the Quaternary period is only a small part of a much larger portion of time, the Cenozoic era, also called the age of mammals. It began roughly sixty-five million years ago, immediately after the Mesozoic era, the age of dinosaurs. So you could argue that in that sense “now” is sixty-five million years long.
    From the perspective of that long, resounding “now,” my neighbourhood transforms into an unfamiliar tableau, an interlude of stillness, a single frame in a time-lapse film that has been running since the beginning of the planet. The maples and oaks and hickories, whose crowns are solid with leaves, become opportunistic, temporary species inhabiting a brief niche in a tumultuous ecology of plants and creatures that appear, flourish and then die away. But the buildings amidst the treestake on an even stranger appearance. These comfortable brick houses I can see from my study window transform into something almost peculiar—the geometric dwellings of a particularly successful species of primate that, in the blink of an eye, has covered the planet.

Chapter Four
ZENO’S HORSE: MANIPULATING TIME
    I might have slept through a lesser storm, but last night Zeus was out for blood. A window-rattling bang woke me with my heart skidding. As soon as I opened my eyes, the bedroom was lit up by a lightning flash, then another, then a peal of thunder that sounded like housesized boulders being dropped on a steel floor. Sleep was out of the question. I got up and went to the window. Outside was pandemonium. Lightning flashed every few seconds, each stroke followed instantly by thunder. The storm was right on top of me. No steamboats.
    The branches of the tree in front of my house were flailing in terrific gusts, and the almost continuous flickering of the purple-white lightning—like a strobe light—captured the movement of the leaves and branches in stop-motion. I saw the wet green of the new maple leaves as they twisted and fluttered in the wind. Above the tree, lightning bolts laced the sky like instant maps of dazzling rivers.
    It was a terrific spectacle, and I watched until the gaps between the lightning and the thunder stretched longer and longer and the flashes began to fade in the distance. Finally the storm abated, on its way to the countryside to startle sleeping cattle and to drench fields. I went back to bed thankful I wasn’t camping.
    This morning I got up to a quiet, sunny day, the second Friday of May. Except for wet soil and some downed branches on the back lawn,you’d never guess at the violence