Surprised by the Seasons

Autumn on the Seine, by Monet

"I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth.  What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights?  you could say. "it's cold again; it was cold before," but you couldn't make the key connection and say, "it was cold this time last year," because the notion of "year" is precisely the one you lack.  Assuming you hadn't yet noticed any orderly progression of heavenly bodies, how long would you have to live on earth before you could feel any assurance that one one long particular long period of cold would, in fact, end?  "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease":  God makes this guarantee very early in Genesis to a people whose fears on this point had perhaps not been completely allayed."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek