"The word season is agricultural; its ancestor in Latin means seedtime. The word hour comes from the more usual Latin for season; the horae commutationes, 'the changing seasons,' was the Roman year. It was their sense that time stands for awhile; a season is a statio, a standing (this is the word that becomes season). seasons divide into days, into hours, hours into minutes, momenti temporis. Ancient time was fluid and unclocked. Our time is measured by atomic pulses, in nanoseconds. It is tense with anxiety, bedeviled by a fanatic precision."

Guy Davenport -- Introduction to Charles Burchfield's Seasons, (p. xiv).