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Everybody talks about time all the time: There's never enough time. It's high time she realized that. I'm sorry, but you're out of time. You should have thought of that a long time ago. Is it in real time or slow motion? I have jet lag. Just in the nick of time. Or I have to kill time. Time marches on. It's a thing of timeless beauty. Time is money. Time and tide wait for no man. Time, it often seems, is the central problem in a person's life. But who really reflects on the nature of time? Who asks the questions of the great Gauguin painting of youth, maturity and age in Tahiti: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"

Christopher Dewdney does. He writes about time with the agility and insight of the poet he is, and with the clear exposition of an engaging and passionate teacher. Early on in The Soul of the World, he lays out the two poles of his exploration. One is represented by the psychologist William James, who noted that we cannot grasp the present moment, that it is "gone in the instant of becoming." (In this, he is close to Augustine and the whole Christian tradition, for which "now" is regarded as not in time at all.) The other is represented by the painter Paul Cézanne, who believed it was his task capture the moment as it passed. "Capture its reality in paint!" he wrote. "To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become the moment."

• Soul of the World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time, by Christopher Dewdney, HarperCollins, 243 pages, $29.95

Dewdney embodies Cézanne's quest by framing the whole book in one passing year of the writer's life. True, the meat of each chapter lays out in stimulating detail the study of time. In one, for example, he leads us from the origin of the seven-day week to the invention of the clock to the parsing of time into seconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds, femtoseconds and attoseconds. (The last, by the way, represents a billionth of a billionth of a second. ) In another, he looks at our increasing ability to manipulate and recapitulate time, beginning with Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of a galloping horse. But shot through each chapter are the writer's own memories and his efforts to fix a moment in time.

It may well be that Dewdney himself intended his poetic descriptions and reflections to serve as examples of the ideas he explores, but the examples outrun the theories. He notices that in her last days, his mother continually looked toward the clock at her bedside. He remembers how his father - archeologist and natural historian Selwyn Dewdney - helped him not to fear thunderstorms by teaching him to count the beats between the sound and the flash. He sees how time appeared to slow in the moment of a streetcar accident when he realized a collision was inevitable. He describes the changes in the light in the sky and in the plants and trees in his garden as they pass through the seasons of the year, from winter to winter. He evokes the way that time seems to stand still in the liminal moment of sunset. He does this often enough to remind me that almost everyone who goes on a trip comes back with pictures of sunsets. Why?

Among these moments, two especially stand out. In one, he describes how he had friends to dinner and invited each to remember him or herself as each was in the year when the wine they were drinking was made. There are enough friends and enough bottles to make this party game a wonderful weaving of time present and time past. In the other, he finds kitten tracks on a brick in the wall of his house, and pursues the bricks to the place they were made and the geological strata from which their material came, ending at the site of the old brickworks and delighting in a welter of fossils 120,000 years old.

Within this framework, the science Dewdney describes seems increasingly mad. Einstein and Minkowski, with their ideas of the space-time continuum, are sensible and staid. (Indeed, Einstein and the philosopher Wittgenstein agree with Augustine that "now" is not in time at all.) But after them come scientists breaking time into those attoseconds in pursuit of so-called gravity waves. An astrophysicist suggests that time will eventually run backward, so that everything that ever happened will happen again in reverse. Another proves the universe did not really come out of nothing, nor did it really begin, although of course there was the Big Bang. Another says that although everything will eventually fall into a black hole, the hole will leak, either making something entirely new or perhaps simply dissipating ... into what? Still others believe that the universe was created for people, and that the end result will be some kind of super-being who fills the entire universe.

It is striking how sane Dewdney's evocations are beside the theories of the scientists. I wonder if he might not have gone further and said so. The theories remind one of the crazy lengths to which thinkers went in the late Middle Ages to preserve the geocentric Ptolemaic picture of the universe. Maybe we are in a similar time now.

I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck. It read, "The meek are getting ready." One wishes for Dewdney to join Cézanne and the poet Shelley - whom he also cites - to reclaim our right as experiencing individuals to know time as well as or better than such scientists can.

William Bryant Logan is an arborist in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the author of Oak: The Frame of Civilization and Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth.