Page 60 - Like No Business I Know

Beige

conversations during the professor’s exercise and massage. Skivvers
was a teacher of philosophy and social sciences at the local state
college, so Sid ultimately got around to asking him about the
phenomenon of time: why people had more but thought there was
less.”
“Professor Skivvers explained that time had to be looked at in two
ways: the more-or-less even flow of clock time and the subjective
perception of duration we human beings experience because of our
conscious minds. The same half hour will seem to pass slowly or
quickly for different people engaged in different activities. Everyone
recognizes that intuitively, but Sid still wondered why people with
plenty of time nevertheless felt that the sand in their hourglass was
running out way too fast. So they got into a discussion about life and
death, mortality and immortality. Rather than wander too far afield
from the topic at hand—your interest in Beige—we can summarize
the professor’s lesson to Sid Arthur on the next slide.”
“Here you see the contrast between prehistoric man—on the
left—and modern man—on the right. Our ancestor—who, of
course, was biologically identical to us—had a short average life span,
thirty to forty years. Anyone living that long had struggled incessantly
to survive, had gone through extremes of weather, near-starvation,
fights with animals and other humans. He or she would already be a
grandparent, perpetually surrounded by dependents and competitors,
childbirth and sudden death. Such a life must, in many ways, have
been ‘nasty, short and brutish,’ as another philosopher described it.
But subjectively it would have seemed like a long life, precisely
because it was crowded with incident, crises, emotional turmoil. That
person would have a strong belief in an afterlife, reinforced by
ignorance of the non-magical origins of physical phenomena, and
would not mind dying.”
“On the other side of the screen is life as we know it. Thanks to
medical science and political stability in the industrialized nations,
most of us lead long lives in a safe milieu. Struggle is comparatively
slight; thanks to housing, transportation and electricity, both the
seasons and the diurnal cycle are largely invisible or irrelevant. We
live indoors with a full larder. The stress our bodies endure, as Sid
Arthur saw for himself, is the result of this lifestyle: too much to eat,
not enough physical activity. But what is happening to our subjective

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