Time Actually is a Straight Line, Not a Flat Circle

"If time is not true, what purpose have watchmakers?"

Watchmen, Chapter IV, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

Time is an illusion.

That is the cliche and the axiom of today's pop-culture pseudo-intellectualism. We mere mortals, right?, perceive time linearly and have an assembly-line understanding of causality -- the effect of a cause directly follows that cause. Time, though, functions differently on some cosmic or divine scale. To entities unconfined to it, the abstraction is manifested and recognized as a more nuanced geometry. Time is a circle, and in our unevolved state, we cannot comprehend such a complex notion. How could past, present, and future coincide?

In this socialized esotericism, humans are surely on track to unlocking time travel. The hand-like Heptapods in Arrival, Donnie Darko from Donnie Darko, the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, Rust Cohle from True Detective -- all perceivers of circular time -- embody that transcendental space extrinsic of the human experience to which we believe we are to existentially strive toward.

If bound by circular time, then we are trapped in uncontrolled, cyclical futility, as Nietzsche posited. If unbound, regardless of its geometry, time has no bearing nor is it in any way relevant. Only from this fourth-dimensional vantage point can the line of time (as seen in our third-dimensional world) be observed in its truer form: a flat circle.

Ringing any bells?

But time is no more a man-made phenomenon than the spatial limitations of the world around us. We did not invent space any more or less than we invented time. It is, moreover, not an illusion nor is it nonexistent inasmuch as finitude is real and existent. We know finitude exists because we are of it. We die, we age, we are born. Things change. Entropy is seemingly all-encompassing. Nothing material lasts forever. Time quantifies and thereby justifies the reality of these ephemeralities. Since there are set time limits, especially within a deterministic universe, time is in and of itself finite. Finitude, then, by this logic, is best expressed as a straight line. Circular time is an oxymoron. That is the real illusion. Circles, if anything, represent anti-time -- infinity. 

If, however, material existence is an illusion, only then can we begin to deconstruct time as a pillar of reality. But both ontics and time are irretrievably tangled because they are manifestations of transience. So either time is not a flat circle and it is a line, or it doesn't exist at all. And these are mutually exclusive.

True Detective, Watchmen, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Donnie Darko, and Arrival do not actually depict perceptions of circular time -- and if the creators disagree then they are wrong -- but perceptions of reality sans time.

But time, after all, I suppose, is an illusion. So who knows?