The Balaton Time
I revisited a friend at his Balaton lake house last weekend. Balaton is the largest lake in Central Europe also known as the Hungarian sea. Just 500 kilometers away and the weather was warmer than the cold snow packed Cluj. I had the sun, the view and more than a stack of books at his lakeside house. And as chance had to have it, next to Taleb’s signed copy of Black Swan was a book, ‘Riding the waves of culture’ by Fons Trompenaars. The book had a complete chapter on Time. This is the chapter abstract with my interpretation for you.
Culturally we either think of time sequentially as a series of passing events or synchronously with interrelated past, present and future. The ideas about the future and memories of the past both shape the present action. Time can be legitimately conceived of as a line of sequential events passing us at regular intervals. Or as cyclical and repetitive, compressing past, present and future by what these have in common, seasons and rhythms.
In the Greek myth the Sphinx, a monster with the face of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird, asked all wayfarers on the road to Thebes, ” What creature is it that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noonday and three legs in the evening?” Those unable to answer she ate. Oedipus, however answered “man” and the Sphinx committed suicide. He had grasped that this riddle was a metaphor for time. Four legs was a child crawling, two legs the adult and three legs and old person leaning on a stick. By thinking in a longer sequence about time, the riddle was solved.
How a culture thinks of time helps it interpret and find meaning in life. Even our conception of time is strongly affected by culture because time is an idea rather than an object. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, saw it as a social construct enabling members…
To read the complete article visit Business Standard.
Author: Orpheus | Date: 29 February 2012 | Comments (0)
Categories: Time Cycles, Time Triads
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