Ursula, on time

… we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.  The book is all there, all at once, between its covers.  But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the fist page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers …

 It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to the present, or plan how his present might relate to his future.  He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time…

-Ursula K Le Guin, from "The Dispossessed"