We don't think about time much, do we?
Time surrounds us. We can't think about it any more than a fish can imagine the water around him.
Einstein said time is an illusion. Henri Bergson see it as "duration", a natural flow. A Buddhist would see a circle, a priest as eternity's antechamber, a historian a history of human development and decay.
It's all these things and more. In this book, I distinguish between chronological, personal and circular approaches to time. There is a large gap between our relentlessly chronological views of it and the non-European perception of time, a fact which leads to much misunderstanding and miscommunication. Part of it is the imprecision of our own speech, part of it is simply, due to the separate evolution of world cultures.
