Time enough at last

The title of this entry comes from a Twilight Zone episode that originally aired on November 20, 1959. In this episode, the character Henry Bemis (played by Burgess Meredith), derided by his boss and wife as a "reader," is the sole survivor of a nuclear blast and finally has his time freed from work and family life to devote to his cherished hobby, reading books. Unfortunately for Mr. Bemis, his thick reading spectacles fall to the ground and shatter, leaving him with opportunity but not ability to enjoy his sudden surplus of time. Like Mr. Bemis, I too am a reader, and of late I've been thinking a bit about what some writers have to say about the subject of time.

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In a two-paged essay entitled No So Fast!, Donnella Meadows proposes a solution for the world's activists and thinkers and people who generally think the world is need of saving:

Slowing down. Yes, that's what I said. Slowing down.

Slowing down could be the single most effective solution to the particular save-the-world struggle I immerse myself in -- the struggle for sustainability, for living harmoniously and well within the limits and laws of the earth.

Meadows reasons that reducing our constant hurry might change the ways we live and think such that the world mightn't need so much saving.

Said Thomas Merton, who spent his time in a Trappist monastery: "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist...most easily succumbs: activism and over-work.... To allow oneself to be carried away by a
multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many people, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

In closing, Meadows coyly notes that she's too busy to take her own advice.

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In a three-paged essay entitled Someone is stealing your life, Michael Ventura talks about time in the context of work. Ventura writes, "I learned about drones by droning," and his peculiar list of jobs sounds as if they're taken from Studs Terkel's book Working. Ventura's central point is that his employers are the ones stealing his life:

It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid vacation per year. A year has 52 weeks. Even a comparatively unskilled, uneducated worker like me..., even I had enough math to figure out that two goes into 52 ... how many times? Twenty-six. Meaning it would take me 26 years on the job to accumulate one year for myself. And I could only have that in 26 pieces, so it wouldn't even feel like a year. In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that he owned.

Ventura acknowledges that those who finance or invest in a company deserve a fair return on their investment; he pushes convention when he says that the people doing the work also deserve a fair return on their investment, a return that includes a stake in the game and some decision making power over their own lives and livelihoods.

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In an eighteen-paged article entitled Time & Its Discontents, John Zerzan examines the epistemology and values of time. What is time? How do we know time really exists? How did people think of time before the technology for measuring time came into being? Did the invention of machines that measure time actually create modern conceptions of time?

Zerzan's themes revolve around hierarchy in its various forms. One form is the system of division of labor that arose with factory systems, about which he writes:

An increasingly complex class society requires an ever larger array of time signals. Fights against time...gave way to struggles of time; resistance to being yolked to time and its inherent demands was defeated in general, replaced, typically, by disputes over the fair determination of time schedules or the length of the work day.

In other words, the question shifted away from whether people ought to be "yolked to time"--and instead the question shifted toward one of degree--how much ought people be yolked to time?

A second form of hierarchy is civilization itself. He writes:

In the world of alienation no adult can contrive or decree the freedom from time that the child habitually enjoys -- and must be made to lose. Time training, the essence of schooling, is vitally important to society. This training, as Fraser (1984) very cogently puts it, "bears in almost paradigmatic form the features of a civilizing process." A patient of Joost Meerlo (1966) "expressed it sarcastically: 'Time is civilization,' by which she meant that scheduling and meticulousness were the great weapons used by adults to force the youngsters into submission and servility."

What I like the most about Zerzan's article is how it asks difficult questions about time--a concept that most of us take for granted. What is time? How do we know time really exists? What are the effects and consequences of our current conceptions and socially constructed beliefs about time?