“What hour is it?” I asked, reaching instinctively for my pocketwatch.
Malik took a step back. “Time for Kentrosaurus to hatch. Time to plant the millet. Time for the magnolia buds to open. Professor Denison, I’m afraid you persist in thinking of time as numbers. You think of meaningless units of time - weeks, hours, minutes - based on what? Movements of faraway planets? Of what use to us is that? Why not pay attention to the precise 30-year life cycle of the bamboo Guadua trinii or the exactly repeated mitotic cycle of the paramecium? The whole Earth has a heartbeat.”
He paused, swung his tail from side to side, and squinted. “And some things happen too slowly for you to notice. If you sit quite still, you can hear the grinding down of mountains, the stretching upwards of trees, the pushing forward of continents.”
Sure, but the point of the quote in the book was the character being taught that the method of timekeeping he was raised with is meaningless in the mutualist, pre-industrial society he now finds himself in. It’s a decentering moment where the character, and by extension the reader, learns that other ways of doing and being exist beyond what they’ve internalized as normal.
