This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
Tolkien • The Hobbit
Talking about time is a waste of time. Time is merely an abstraction from process and what is needed are better languages and better pictures for describing process in all its variety. In the sciences the big breakthrough in describing process came with the differential and integral calculus, that made it possible to shuttle between quantitative measures of state and quantitative measures of change. But every inquiry into a new phenomenon begins with the slimmest grasp of its qualitative features and labors long and hard to reach as far as a tentative logical description. What can avail us in the mean time, still tuning up before the first measure, to reason about change in qualitative terms?
