On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast. Catherine Blyth

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СКАЧАТЬ busy does not always mean real work,’ said Thomas Edison. ‘There must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose. Seeming to do is not doing.’ Edison was an arch doer. The indefatigable wizard of Menlo Park’s inventions, including the phonograph and film camera, secured 1,093 patents in the US alone and sired several major industries. ‘I have got so much to do and life is so short,’ he told a friend. ‘I am going to hustle.’ Edison had a simple scam for packing it all in: pickpocket time. On average he worked eighteen maniacal hours a day (up to sixty on the trot for truly intractable puzzles), snatching a few hours’ sleep a night and taking restorative daytime catnaps in one of the cots that dotted his workstations. By the age of forty-seven he estimated his true age was eighty-two, since ‘working only eight hours a day would have taken till that time’.

      You may shudder to measure your life’s output in Edison years, and no healthcare provider would recommend it. Fittingly, it is thanks to him that everybody’s day stretches beyond its natural limit, courtesy of the light bulb.

      I doubt whether Socrates’ and Edison’s definitions of a time-rich life would have had much in common. However, both recognized a timeless danger: if you mistake frothing from task to task for meaningful activity in its own right, you will fizz about like a pill in a glass of water, expending vast amounts of energy on increasingly invisible returns. It is also a licence for rudeness and thoughtlessness, for avoiding events we do not want to attend, relieving us from the responsibility of interrogating our choices. Not my fault: I’m just too busy! Margaret Visser, a historian of everyday life, wrote:

      ‘No time’ is used as an excuse and also as a spur: it both goads and constrains us, as a concept such as ‘honour’ did for the ancient Greeks. Abstract, quantitative, and amoral, unarguable, exerting pressure on each person as an individual, the feeling that we have no time escapes explanation and censure by claiming to be a condition created entirely out of our good fortune. We have ‘no time’ apparently because modern life offers so many pleasures, so many choices, that we cannot resist trying enough of them to ‘use up’ all the time we have been allotted.

      In reality busy is a hollow word, a descriptive term for effort; it reveals nothing about whether that effort is productive, purposeful or a waste of disorganized time. Next time I feel busy, I will ask myself, what for?

      Part Two

What is Time and Where Does it Go?

      Includes: why time was a god, then a gift, then a bully; how your view of time shapes your life; what is the point of a femtosecond; the joy of cattle time; what happens when you lose time sense; why seconds slow down in sinking ships; how to think faster – although time-poor thinking makes us stupid; why distractions are addictive; why Roman philosophers hated hanging around; and what Hilary Mantel and Hamlet gained from procrastination.

      2

How Time Gives Us the World

      Why we invented it, how it reinvents us

      Sometimes I wish that nobody had invented clocks. Then my days would not be chopped into miserly minutes. I would have all the time in the world.

      It is a sweet fantasy. But I need not hunt far to find it. This is the land of time that our toddler inhabits, and what a merry place it looks. How he howls if we urge him to hurry while he is studying a marathon of ants on a pavement, or try to scoop him up before he has patted the last jag of jigsaw into place. Often we ignore him; we have to bowl him off to nursery on time, into his bath on time. But how he blossoms on weekends when the day ebbs and flows with the hunger, curiosity and vitality that set the beat of his clock.

      ‘Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being,’ advised psychologist James Hillman. ‘It’s the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit it’s right here.’ If this is bliss, my son has it. Ask when something happened and he answers, ‘Yesterday.’ Ask when something is going to happen and he smiles, ‘Today?’ then gets back to what he was doing. The only clocks he respects are dandelions, because his present consists of whatever present thing grips him.

      Children remind us that obeying time does not come naturally. When my son rears in protest as we try to saddle him with our schedule, I worry that he is learning to see time as his enemy. Because clocks are not going anywhere, and thank goodness for that. This chapter explores why we invented time and how it reinvents us. To a surprising degree our life is shaped by something often hidden from us: the version of time that we carry around inside our head. There are persuasive arguments for seeing time as your friend.

      1. How time changed the world

      Time is confusing. It is invisible, unbiddable; we cannot touch, taste, see or smell it, although you would have to travel a long way – as far as the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon rainforest – to find anyone above the age of ten with their wits intact who might deny that it exists.

      The Pirahã are not just foxed by time. They also have no concept of numbers. Show them five soya beans and two soya beans and they cannot count the difference. Time blindness is an extension of their number blindness. This is because what we are talking about, when we talk about time, is something by which to count life. Its many puzzles have bewitched astrophysicists and befuddled philosophers, but set aside the black holes and the sophistry and you could do worse than this explanation given in 1762 by Henry Home, an industrious farmer-judge, who served as mentor to Adam Smith and David Hume and as the midwife to Scotland’s Enlightenment: ‘A child perceives an interval, and that interval it learns to call time.’

      The complication is that from a user’s point of view, time is actually two separate things: it is the dimension in which we exist, and an organizational device like a compass. The compass’s job is to help us to navigate the dimension: to orientate ourselves in space, to measure the duration of events, to co-ordinate actions, and to plot our next steps. Day to day, however, we tend to think of time as something else entirely: a resource, divided into days, hours, minutes, seconds – the stuff that we never have enough of.

      If you can bring yourself to forget its dismaying habit of marching on, then time grows easier to admire. This utterly ingenious intellectual technology lets us impose order on the rolling hurry of succession that is existence, by subdividing experience into three categories – past, present and future. It is also elastic, spanning infinitesimally tiny intervals such as attoseconds (a quintillionth or billionth of a billionth of a second) and epic photonic journeys across space called light years (5,878,625,373,184 miles). Its applications are numberless.

      Try to imagine life without atomic clocks.

      take a ten-second pause: really picture that thought

      Did you envisage a world without smartphones, satellites or the internet? Almost certainly there were no nuclear submarines. It would be a slower place by far.

      This little thought experiment illustrates an odd thing that happens when we find new ways to measure time: we transform what we can do with it. It is what cosmologist Gerald Whitrow was getting at when he spoke of ‘the invention of time’. Clocks were not simple witnesses to humanity’s story but accelerants. Each technological leap in timekeeping sprang a change.

      The earliest evidence that humanity looked to the sky in search of answers about time is a painting on the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, dating to 15,000 BC. Twenty-nine black dots undulate like hoofprints beneath СКАЧАТЬ