Time, Ursual Le Guin, The Dispossessed 1974 pp 194-196

 "It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; [they] can't distance [themself] from the past and understand how it relates to [their]future. [They] do not know time passes; [they] do not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it that the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of [their] reason and [their] unconscious, [they] see all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.... you could see it as an effort to strike a balance...Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But it stops there. It deals with all that changes but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time-never of the circle of time.

...Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving...One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year...two orbits two years, and so on . One can count the orbits endlessly - an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the timeteller, the clock. But within the system. the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal...this is very queer and interesting...The atoms...have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible, the little timelessnesses added together to make up time. And then on the big scale, the universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. and there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or  seasons or promises." Ursual Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974 pp194-196