Meanwhile, the philosophers looked for meaning outside the world of changing, time-bound things. Historians who have studied the ancient view of time observe that it differs from our own. But even when they abandon the Church, moderns cannot forsake the notion that some meaning speaks to them through the passage of time, that history is building to some flamboyant conclusion. We have turned history into a highway and delivered the pagan wheels of time from their futile rotations. This much at least of Christian experience has entered our culture, to the extent that even a secular education continues to transmit it, whether in the teaching of history or in the geometrical images of time employed by the physicists.
Time simply becomes another eternal thing, to be measured and managed along with everything else.
And then, below the measures of objective time, between the beats, there grows the wordless agony of subjective time. It is more like a persistent pressure on the mind that there is always something to be done. Most people I know seem to be rushed, even when I cannot imagine what it is they could be rushed about. Neither, I think, can they. Time is both death and judgement.