Metaphors For Time

We experience duration, remember past events and anticipate future events but cannot directly observe a temporal interval in the way that we do observe spatial extensions and distances. The points in a line exist simultaneously whereas the moments in a period of time exist successively. (Of course they do. That is a tautology.)

Since we cannot see time but are continually affected by it, how do we describe it? Poul Anderson's titles include "The Horn of Time the Hunter." And Time rides forth like a wind in the night. See Wind, World's Edge And Time.

Indeed, the wind is always with us:

"'...a wind blows from tomorrow and it smells of war.'"

-Orion Shall Rise, CHAPTER FIFTEEN, 4.

"'A minute more,' she craved, from a tide that - in this hour when serenity was torn to rags and scattered on the wind from the future - bore her toward Oneness." (ibid.)

Sometimes time is more abstractly described as a fourth dimension:

"' - Give you military your heads, and you'd build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future.'

"'We are always being invaded by the future,' Ferune said. 'The next part of it will not be pleasant.'"

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT V, p. 490.

The future as perennial invader of the present: imagine temporal battleships arriving... There is a Time War in Anderson's "Flight to Forever" but that one is in the other direction.

Here is another obscure metaphor relating to time. In Lurgan, Northern Ireland, they make long spades so a long face is "a face like a Lurgan spade." Sheila's aunt, elaborating this metaphor, described someone as "Two shoulders with a Lurgan spade between them," then as "A Lurgan spade the length of the day and the marra..."