Boundaries - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 191

The Deeper Themes of Arrows and Cycles
I have lectured for years in my introductory courses about the themes of
time's arrow and time's cycle. Often, a student will ask, with that charming
naiveté of a freshman who thinks that professors really do have simple
answers to the deepest questions of the ages: Well, which is right? I always
reply that the only possible answer can be "both and neither."
We often try to cram our complex world into the confines of what human
reason can grasp, by collapsing the hyperspace of true conceptual complexity
into a single line, and then labeling the ends of the line with names construed
as polar opposites—so that all richness reduces to a single dimension and
contrast of supposed opposites. All these dichotomies are false (or
incomplete) because they can capture but a fraction of actual diversity, but
one might be better (or at least more productive) than another because the
limited axis of its particular contrast might express something more
fundamental, more extensive in implication, or more in harmony with
concerns of the actual debaters (see Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of
dichotomy).
I concluded that, if we must dichotomize, time's arrow and time's cycle is the
most fruitful contrast for understanding the major issues underlying the
greatest transformation that geology has or could contribute to human thought
—the discovery of deep time. I reached this conclusion for several reasons: I
believe that the major actors who struggled with time and the meaning of
history from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century kept
such a dichotomy at the forefront of their thought; thus, although arrow
versus cycle may be as restrictively simplified as any single contrast, it was,
at least, their dichotomy. For me, this contrast became a key for unlocking
both the structure and meaning of great historical documents that I had read
several times before, but had never understood or grasped as unified
statements. But I also regard arrow versus cycle as a particularly "good"
dichotomy because each of its poles captures a deep principle that human
understanding of com-