Man and Time

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Man and Time J. B. Priestley Man and Time marks the culmination of J. B. Priestley's lifelong interest in a riddle that has for centuries plagued great thinkers and ordinary men alike-the riddle of Time. Priestley has cast this major work into the form of a personal essay, for, as he says in his Introduction, any full examination of the nature of Time must be "deeply subjective, belonging to one man's inner world of thoughts, feelings, intuitive ideas " A key thesis of this personal essay is that the broad concept of Time, and our experience of time, includes much more than the kind of time measured by clocks. The conventional belief that clock time or "passing time" is the only time there is-and that our lives are wholly contained within it-is, Priestley argues, responsible for many of the ills of this modern age. Into his framework of a personal essay Priestley has drawn an immense range of material. He traces the development of time-measurement devices (which are illustrated in... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Man and Time J. B. Priestley Man and Time marks the culmination of J. B. Priestley's lifelong interest in a riddle that has for centuries plagued great thinkers and ordinary men alike-the riddle of Time. Priestley has cast this major work into the form of a personal essay, for, as he says in his Introduction, any full examination of the nature of Time must be "deeply subjective, belonging to one man's inner world of thoughts, feelings, intuitive ideas " A key thesis of this personal essay is that the broad concept of Time, and our experience of time, includes much more than the kind of time measured by clocks. The conventional belief that clock time or "passing time" is the only time there is-and that our lives are wholly contained within it-is, Priestley argues, responsible for many of the ills of this modern age. Into his framework of a personal essay Priestley has drawn an immense range of material. He traces the development of time-measurement devices (which are illustrated in striking photographs and diagrams); he reveals what can be learned about Time from metaphysicians and poets, physicists and mathematicians, novelists and playwrights. In the book's second part he looks at man's changing concepts of Time through history-from primitive societies through the great ancient civilizations and European history up to the present day. And in all these sections Priestley's survey of Man and Time is valuably extended and supplemented by illustrations. The important third part of the book begins with a discussion of our strange (but nonetheless common) experiences of Time. From hundreds of letters, sent to him after a television broadcast Priestley draws striking examples of premonitions, precognition in dreams, and similar processes. He then presents the theories developed to explain such experiences by such great 20th-century thinkers as J. W. Dunne and P. D. Ouspensky. Finally Priestley describes some of his own remarkable experiences of Time and offers the thought-provoking conclusions he has drawn from them and from his long study of the subject. His conclusions reveal the major importance to us all of an awareness of the real relationship between Time and the life of man: Vissza