54
Tennis Time and the Mental Clock
"I long for an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes
attached to a human head, exactly how much of one's life a person devotes to
the present, how much to memories, and how much to the future.  This
would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time.  What human
time really is.  And we could surely define three basic types of human being,
depending on which variety of time was dominant."
Milan Kundera
"a turning of our states of consciousness toward the future...[makes] our
ideas and sensations succeed one another with greater rapidity; our
movements no longer cost us the same effort."
Henri Bergson
"If man's reach does not exceed his grasp then what's a heaven for?"
Robert Browning
Many chapters ago, we visited a peculiar creature: the spadefoot toad
of Arizona.  During long dry spells, the toad nursed the stores of moisture
and food packed away in its cellular structure by crawling under the sand,
shutting down its metabolic systems, and slipping into slumber.  Lethargy
was the life-saver that allowed the snoozing beast to go for months--perhaps
even years--without a sip of water.
On the other hand, when an infrequent shower soaked the desert floor,
the toad shook off its torpor, wriggled to the surface, cried out for company,
listened for the croaked sounds of a gathering crowd, then headed for the
nearest puddle.  There, it leaped into a frenzy of action, wooing females at a
rapid rate, then grappled with them in sexual ecstasy.  Its manic eroticism
was as much a survival mechanism as its former inertia.  For only by
coupling quickly could the toad sire a new generation that might grow to
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