How we mark time through the tick and the tock

The idea that a temporal end, however arbitrary, weights the time preceding it with a significance it might not otherwise possess is given its fullest expression in Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. In this, perhaps his most influential book, Kermode argued that fiction, like apocalypse, gives shape to time by translating the relentless tick-tick-tick of bare chronicity into the tick-tock of a meaningful plot. 

By listening for the next tick as a tock, as the end of something that preceded it rather than the next in a meaningless and interminable succession, we invest time with shape and significance. And if tock is a tiny apocalypse, the end of a millennium ought to be a very big one.

So relieve yourself of the apocalypse, the end! armageddon, judegement day, when the Good Lord will return, these are all nonsenses inculcated into our thinking by religious fanatics, mystics, gurus et al.

T S Eliot had formulated the question of time in ‘Burnt Norton’. Eliot’s premise is that ‘If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable.’ Humanity needs some kind of redemption from time, but, this cannot be so, for paradoxically, only through time time is conquered.’ 

Because we are in time and have been all our time, we need a promise the we will be relieved of this chronological time by the end a redemptive time which brings about the end of time.