About Time

In my fairly recent post of 06/08/2014 Edmund de Waal talks about repetition and time: "repetition is very interesting, is fascinating if you make things, if you’re a musician … as soon as you put one thing next to another you’ve got a gap, you’ve got a caesura, you’ve got a pause … something that happens between them … if you keep going then you have to deal with time."
This concept of time in what he makes puzzled me for a while; I couldn't immediately see where time comes into it, and could only see a relevance in that he is interested in poetry and his placings of his pots in lines are, as he says, like poems - poetry, like music, inherently involving time.

I then heard, a couple of weeks or so ago, on the radio a reading of Adam Thorpe's 'On Silbury Hill':
"... time ... not viewed ... as abstract ...
... Time was merely effect: a fading flower, the sun touching the hill, a distant memory, an accumulation of chalk. ...
... time was not ... measured precisely. ...
... time is not what my watch says ... but a distance, the long strides between myself as I stand here and the drumming. ..."

I think, for me, that goes some way towards explaining De Waal's statement.