Hamlet's millstone.

I've always had a complicated relationship with time.

Deadlines to meet, places to be, milestones to mark, a mother who burned into me the idea of never, ever being late.

The gossamer thread running through it all was the knowledge time, my time, would be short, and I'd better do something with it. Something great, and a likely topic for therapy dished up as a bonus.

I don't believe I'm unique in any way in these experiences. It's ingrained in the human condition. Our relationship with time is something that toys with us until we've none of it left.

Most of us spend quite a lot of the time we have with something held six inches in front of our eyes. Literal things, of course, like tablets or phones or hands, but more metaphorical things, too, like time indulged watching television, or thinking about what you've on tap for tomorrow, or how a project is going to come together, or buying groceries, or paying bills. They're moments lived but barely known in any reflective sense.

The time we devote to what's happening in the next minute of our existence is a distraction, the hand in front of our eyes.

Pascal called this divertissement, people filling hours with diversions because stillness lets the bigger, unanswerable questions be heard: mortality, insignificance, the fact that we didn't choose to be here and don't know why. Heidegger has a version, too, explaining our everyday absorption in tasks as a way of not confronting our own very finite horizon.

The hand is there so often and so persistently, we only really notice it when it's gone, when it falls away, and it's in those moments we sense the immensity of time, and the tininess of us. Gazing at mountains, we're shrunken by their size. Looking across an ocean, we see only blue nothingness. Craning our necks upwards into a cool, crisp, vast night sky, we watch the inkiness expand, hoping for shooting stars. We're made dust in the wind.

Some build monuments to focus our attention on the idea. Stonehenge. The pyramids. Others build mythology.

Fresh out of school, I read Hamlet's Mill, a sprawling exploration of obscure myths and creation stories and whose central thesis is, long time, and the circling pendulum of the stars overhead, is the prime mover behind our mythologies. You see, the earth's wobble creates an apparent movement through the Zodiac, leading us into different ages, with a new age happening once every 2,160 years, and taking 26,000 years (or so) to make a complete revolution.

The "battle" taking place between the old age and the new resulted in recurring mythologies that crossed cultures, locations, and times, all the way down to the present. The turning skies became the grinding of a stone, or the swirling of a whirlpool, and we are receiving transmissions from the past. So went the thesis.

The book is still on one of my shelves. The concept fascinated me, and I've wondered since if it's really the same fascination as with the monuments I mentioned earlier, the physical objects humanity's created in the past that hold a connection to long time. Myth, I suppose, is one answer to the wobble. Building is another. I seem to be drawn to both, but I can touch a monument.

We tend to think of those things and places— the solar alignments of Stonehenge as only one example— as being in our past but, being human, some among us have continued the making well into the present.

The Clock of the Long Now was proposed in 1995 and became an early-Internet sensation. We were drawing closer to the Millennium, and I suppose we all were thinking about time a little more than usual. My generation had listened to Prince sing about it since the early 80s. We were ready.

The clock, as described in Wired, was to tick once per year and be built to withstand 10,000 years of un-maintained ticking. I contributed to the effort when its governing organization was formed (it's now Bezos-run and doesn't need my five bucks to get it built).

One contemporary monument that predates Bezos' billions is Star Axis by artist Charlie Ross. Ross discovered a location in New Mexico in 1976 and began digging. And digging, and digging, and digging. His heroic intention is to transform the landscape into a circular, clarifying window that allows the viewer to literally step forward or backward 13,000 years' of spacetime in the distance of climbing, or descending, a 147-step staircase. To see the sky as early humans once did in the past, and as we hope they will one day in the future. It turns out he and I have read the same book.

Star Axis is targeted for completion this year.

What he'll do with all of his spare time, after having spent fifty years of a life's work moving earth and stone in preparation for a view, is unknown.

I hope to be able to ask him if he gives me a moment of it.