The experience of time makes us aware of both cycle and crisis. On the one hand, today repeats yesterday’s pattern and foreshadows tomorrow’s, the seasons revolve, and the life-patterns of the generations are at one with each other. On the other hand, we have the notion of the decisive happening, the moment of truth and of choice, beyond which there is no going back, no recurrence of what preceded that special point of time. In forms of art that make use of the time-dimension—literature, music, drama, film—both these aspects will potentially exist, and either may receive the greater stress. The opposing extremes can be illustrated in the news-reel (for cinema or television) and the documentary film. In the first, there is the record of a unique event, the coronation of a queen, the marriage or burial of a popular figure, a conflagration, or an incident from war: each of these is presented to us as a moment with interesting causes and effects, a key-moment in a series. In the second, there is the suggestion of a recurrent pattern, the making of a particular product, the general habit of life of a community, the passing of the seasons within one spatial context. Dylan Thomas’ radio-play, Under Milk Wood, is an obvious example of this cyclic representation, despite the poet’s highly individual interpretation of life in Llaregyb; so too is Georges Rouquier’s film Farrébique, ou les quatre saisons; and Vladimir and Estragon, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, spend each day in the same pattern of waiting and improvised stratagem. On a different scale, we find a similar phenomenon in the long novel that merely narrates a hero’s adventures, suggesting both the variety within the individual life-pattern and the near-repetition of that pattern within a particular community. Jack Wilton and Nicholas Nickleby are not individualized and are basically unaffected by event: their stories are only nominally theirs. But in the generality of writing the cyclic representation tends to be less extreme.