The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 13

natural events (by their consequences of fire and famine) might be reflecting
the essence of time—and not an irregularity subject to repeal or placation by
prayer and ritual. Time's arrow is the partic- ular product of one culture, now
spread throughout the world, and especially "successful," at least in
numerical and material terms. "Interest in the 'irreversible' and the 'new' in
history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity. On the contrary, archaic
humanity . . . defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the
novelty and irreversibility which history entails" (Eliade, 1954, 48).
I recognize as well that time's arrow and time's cycle are not only culture-
bound but also oversimplified as catch-alls for complex and varied attitudes.
In particular, Eliade shows that each pole of this dichotomy conflates at least
two different versions, related in es- sence to be sure, but with important
distinctions. Time's cycle may refer to true and unchanging permanence or
immanent structure (Eliade's "archetype and repetition"), or to recurring
cycles of separable events precisely repeated. Similarly, the ancient Hebrew
view of time's arrow as a string of unique events between two fixed points of
creation and termination is quite different from the much later notion of
inherent direction (usually a concept of universal progress, but sometimes a
one-way path to destruction, as in the earth's thermodynamic "heat-death"
expected by catastrophists of Lyell's day as a consequence of continual
cooling from an originally molten state). Uniqueness and direction are both
folded into our modern idea of time's arrow, but they arose at different times
and in disparate contexts.
The contrast of arrows and cycles lies so deep in Western thinking about time
that a movement as central as the discovery of geological time could scarcely
proceed uninfluenced by these ancient and persistent visions. I shall try to
show that metaphors of time's arrow and time's cycle formed a focus for
debate, and proved as funda- mental to the formulation of deep time as any
observation about the natural world. If we must have dichotomies, time's
arrow and time's cycle is "right"—or at least maximally useful—as a
framework