时间与人生似乎是个说不尽的话题。时间永远存在于我们的世界，而我们却往往忽视它的存在。
Imagine that you spent your whole life at a single house. Each day at the same hour you entered an artificially-lit room, undressed and took up the same positioning in front of a motion picture camera. It photographed one frame of you per day, every day of your life. On your seventy-second birthday, the reel of film was shown. You saw yourself growing and aging over seventy-two years in less than half an hour (27.4 minutes at sixteen frames per second). Images of this sort, though terrifying, are helpful in suggesting unfamiliar but useful perspectives of time. They may, for example, symbolize the telescoped, almost momentary character of the past as seen through the eyes of an anxious or disaffected individual. Or they may suggest the remarkable brevity of our lives in the cosmic scale of time. If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds.
But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.
By R. Grudin
［参考译文］
两种时间观念
R. 格鲁丁
设想你在同一间房子里度过了一生。每天在同一时刻，你进入一间人工照明的房间，脱去衣服，在摄影机前摆同一姿势。在你一生所有的日子里，摄影机每天给你拍下一个镜头。在你72岁生日那天，放映这部影片。不到半个小时（每秒16个镜头，总共27.4分钟），你就看完了自己在72年里的“兴衰”。这样的图像尽管让人惧怕，却能向我们说明那陌生而有用的时间概念。比方说，它们可能象征着转瞬即逝的过去的缩影，如同在一个忧心忡忡或愤愤不平的人眼中所见的那样。或者它们可能说明了在宇宙的时间里，我们生命的异常短暂。如果将宇宙的估计年龄缩短到72年，人的一生可能只有10秒钟。
但是从另一个角度看时间，每天都有86,000多秒的小永恒。每一秒钟，人体内所进行的不同的分子作用的次数可与宇宙估计年龄中的秒钟数相比。几秒钟的时间已足够酝酿一场革命、进行一次惊人的沟通、孕育一个婴孩、制造一次伤人的侮辱、造成一起突然死亡事件。我们的寿命可以是无限长久，也可以是极其短暂，这取决于我们怎么看待这一切。
［注释］
-perspective [pəˈspektɪv] n. 观点，看法 a point of view
-symbolize [ˈsɪmbəlaɪz] v. 象征 to serve as a symbol of