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Tallis in Wonderland

A Hasty Report From A Tearing Hurry

Raymond Tallis has a measured response to numbered seconds.

“And strangers were as brothers to his clocks”
W.H. Auden

Readers of this column will know that I am committed to snatching time from the jaws of physics; in particular to rescuing it from a reduction to a quasi-spatial dimension and its further reduction to numbers. Thus reduced, time becomes a mere variable – t – that has no qualities, only numerical values, and none of the features that make it central to human life. For example, little t, unlike time as we experience it, has no tenses.

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