If you go to sleep and sleep soundly, you
cannot tell when you awake whether you have slept a minute or an
hour. Time stops when YOU cease to observe the succession of
events. In dying, we duplicate on a big and prolonged scale our
little daily sleeps in life.
If a man were told that after death his soul would not regain
consciousness for a thousand millions of years, he would worry,
and complain of the "long time." But it would make no difference
to him whether the time were a thousand millions of years or
forty seconds--time would not exist for him; he would not know
the difference.
There is little doubt that to the ephemeridae, creatures that
live but for a day, that day must seem as long as our century,
for in their life of incessant activity and agitation every
second is a long space. And there is no doubt that to the giant
turtles of the Galapagos Islands, heavy monsters that live ten
centuries or longer, a week is a fraction of time far less
important than an hour to us. ----
A mysterious thing is time and its divisions. Man manufactures a
watch capable of registering a fraction of a second. And in the
force called light we have a power that can go seven times around
the world in one second.
We estimate our time by years.
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