You go out in the evening and look at the sky and see the stars, slowly wheeling not only through the night but through the year, the seasons. Star patterns unchanging throughout your lifetime, the same constellations, the same Pole Star and Dipper and Eagle and Swan. And you see the moon progressing through its phases, from the thinnest golden crescent of a new moon to the fat, silver roundness of full moon, to the late-rising moon on the wane, shrunken and wan. Moon phases that have been known to man since he first looked at the night sky.

You see sunrise and sunset, varying by a few minutes day after day. Time, the passage of the seasons, the lunar months, the solar year, the days. Time hasn't changed a noticeable fraction of a second in ten million years. The first man who stood on two feet and watched the sunrise and had a glimmering of wonder about time knew the same span of daylight that we know today, the same year. Grass grew as deliberately then as now, and the berry ripened in its own time.

But somewhere along the way man began to count not only the days, but the hours, the minutes, the seconds. Time was unchanged, but man was caught in his own time-traps. The very echoes came to say, "Hurry, hurry, hurry!" And only now and then did anyone stop and ask, "Why, and what for?" And look at the sun and the grass and the trees and know that they weren't hurrying, and sit down and listen. The soft whisper they heard was the sand flowing through the hourglass, the same flow it has had since time began.