These three essays were written about a dozen years apart, from the mid-’80s to 2017. Zerzan has been intrigued by the subject and so has returned to try again.
He thinks that it is with time—that is, our consciousness of this so-elusive object—that we first enter into a symbolic field or dimension. Our lives thus begin an estrangement that grows and grows. Time and alienation are two words that are the measure of each other. Time becomes a thing, standing pitilessly over us.
Taken together maybe these pieces are strands toward solving the puzzle of time. In his view the topic is best understood historically (and pre-historically) so as to ground and be able to chart its course.
Once we lived without time. Now it’s all too real. But it was never a natural or inevitable development. A harbinger of symbolic culture...and look what that’s brought us.
