Circular time is the time of the body with its many rhythms, the time of nature’s seasons, and of the rise and fall of civilisations. The shape of circular time made our relationship to one another and to the world porous, rather than, to use the term employed by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, ‘buffered’: we were at home in the world, dwelling in it, rather than skating over it for a while on our simple linear path.
