“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.”
Check out Gurney’s yt channel if you’re interested in painting
I read a book on color and light theory for artists by him.
Timekeeping has non-capitalist applications tho
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.
I think the point is to address time from a materialist perspective, rather than operating at a rhythm set without reason.
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.
I had this as a kid. Only looked at the pictures.
I watched and loved the mini-series as a dinosaur obsessive kid, but have not checked it recently- I love the beautiful illustrations of European architecture.
How/why anti-capitalism? Does the mini-series elaborate?
The first book isn’t explicitly anti-capitalist so much as pro-mutualist and communalist. The second and third books get explicitly more anti-capitalist. The main antagonist of the second book is a pirate who wants to sell knowledge of Dinotopia to the Europeans and Americans, knowing they’d come to reap and pillage the place and he’d make a fortune off it. The third book tells the story of an ancient, technologically-advanced society off the coast of Dinotopia proper that wants to do an imperialism on the island. It takes an army of Dinotopia’s flying creatures and a plucky band of lemur guerillas (really) to defeat them.
