Notions of history and progress for instance the sense of direction and purpose with which we invest the passage of time are said to be a novelty brought into the world by Christianity. But even when they abandon the Church, moderns cannot forsake the notion that some meaning speaks to them through the passage of time, and 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. But of course, for most people, their own experience of the passage of time more particularly, their own personal history of maturity and age does not exactly vibrate with the living hope these images reflect.
Time simply becomes another thing, to be measured and managed along with everything else.
Finally, 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.