generated other numerically derived conceptual instruments for us to manipulate,
especially the century and the decade. These units are, again, surprisingly recent.
We have been thinking in centuries for only three and a half centuries, and in
decades for only seven decades.^9 Les Murray puts the century mentality a little late,
but his wonderful poem on the subject, “The C19 – 20,” cries out for quotation:
The Nineteenth Century. The Twentieth Century.
There were never any others. No centuries before these.
Dante was not hailed in his time as an Authentic
Fourteenth Century Voice. Nor did Cromwell thunder, After all,
in the bowels of Christ, thisis the Seventeenth Century!^10With all their attendant dangers of facile periodization, their refinements of “long”
and “short,” and their explanatory epithets of “German” or “American,” these
units have become indispensable to our apprehension of the rhythms of time.^11
The centuries, decades, and individual numbered years make orientation in time
so easy that we scarcely any more conceive of the process as orientation. The
numerals provide a time line that appears independent of focalization. In addition,
the Western calendar to which the numbered years are tied is likewise of such rig-
orous power that we consistently assume the existence of a comprehensive time
grid whenever we are working with the past. The consequences have been well
expressed by P.-J. Shaw:
A date is the symbol of a moment rather than the moment itself, and a calen-
dar is a device for identifying a day, month, sometimes a year, distinct from
a system of reckoning, which is a tool for computing the passage of time. But
because the modern (Christian) calendar acts also as the modern system of
reckoning and is universally acknowledged as such, the correspondence be-
tween day and date, between a moment and its given symbol, is so close that
the two tend to be treated as identical. One consequence of this is that the
artificial nature of that date becomes obscured; it assumes the privilege...
of a universal law.^12TIME WITHOUT B.C./A.D.
The situation was profoundly different for the Greeks and Romans, to a degree
that is virtually impossible to recover in the imagination. In the ancient world each
city had its own calendar and its own way of calibrating past time, usually through
Time without b.c./a.d.. 9