This is also from The Soul of a New Machine: One of the engineers in the book burned out and quit and he left a note that read: “I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”
And the thing that strikes me there is that he wasn’t just going to Vermont. He was going somewhere where time was different. He was going to get away from minutes, hours, days. He was back to seasons. Which is actually where the farmer, the medieval farmer, spent most of his time, thinking about what to plant when. Figuring out the seasons was basically what made the agricultural revolution possible.
