Time - Softcover

Introduction
Let me begin with a confession: I have always been preoccupied by time. Whether this propensity was temperamental, or whether in some way it belonged to the place and historical moment in which I was growing up, I am not sure. But I do know that it started early, and has continued throughout my adult life.
Perhaps, like the young Vladimir Nabokov, I was simply a kind of chronophobiac.1 Certainly, I was intensely and palpably aware of time’s existence and its ceaseless passage. Reading some childhood story, in which the ticking of a clock measures the silent night, I would start listening to the clock in my own room, aware that each tick-tock was irreversible, and that the stealing of time, second by second, would never stop. When I walked home from school on some warm afternoon, I was conscious that with each step taken a moment was receding behind me into the past, that the number of such moments a life had in it was fi nite and that the only way to preserve them in some way was to hold them in my mind; in memory. I would remember this moment, I would say to myself; that way, it would not be entirely lost.
Children are natural philosophers; I suspect that more of them experience metaphysical sensations than we know. Nabokov became aware that he existed in the “pure element” of time at the age of four, and he compared the birth of this consciousness to a “second baptism, on more divine lines than the Greek Catholic ducking” seen performed on his younger brother. Perhaps my own exacerbated sense of time’s unstoppable passage arose out of the climate in which my childhood took place. I grew up in Poland, shortly aft er the war— that is, on the territory of vast death. Th e presence of mortality was pervasive and inescapable there. We post-war children knew in our bones that life was a provisional condition; that it could be cut arbitrarily; that its finitude was wrested briefly from death’s infi nity.
These, to be sure, were powerful circumstances; but perhaps they suggest that our basic vision of time can be established quite early, and may be informed by the cultural and historical context we arrive into. But there was another kind of time I was aware of (for various temporalities can coexist, and be folded into each other as subatomic dimensions are apparently folded into each other in the cosmos). This was the ordinary time of our daily lives, and of the human activity all around us. That time moved at an unhurried, temperate, seemingly just-right pace. Of course, what I was experiencing was the unrushed time, the tempo giusto of childhood; but even adult time in Cracow during those years seemed to move more slowly than in any of the places I have lived in since then. I don’t think this was merely a lyrical illusion. Rather, as I refl ect on it in retrospect, I see that this earlier, slower tempo was partly a function of the actual conditions of people’s lives and partly a question of cultural ethos or temper.
Poland in the post-war decades was an impoverished country and an economically static society. Under the aegis of centralised communism, there were no great careers to be made, no glamorous possibilities of upward mobility or the seductive temptations of acquiring great wealth. There was really nothing much to hurry towards. The famous motto of those days, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” summarised in a joke what was often a grim material reality, the downside of social stasis.
But the virtue of these defects was the suffi ciency, the plenitude of time. People had time to sit around the famous eastern European kitchen table and talk late into the night; people had time to ruminate inconsequentially during a slow amble in a park. Here’s Carmen Firan, a Romanian poet now living in New York: “For more than thirty years I lived in the opaque world of communism, where time had no value,” she writes. “All we had left was talking. Our conversations, sometimes delightful, were a never-ending chatter over full ashtrays and cheap bottles of alcohol, night-long discussions, and hung-over mornings. Time was frozen for us. We weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. Neither did we have anywhere to go.”2
People had time for such things. But they also did not question their need or purposes, did not wonder about the returns or the results, or the intrinsic worth of sitting about and talking late into the night. For there was something else in the air of those days, something more elusive than social conditions, and more difficult to demonstrate or pin down: a predisposition to value purely personal and intimate experience, and to savour the textures of that experience; a predilection for a kind of pensiveness, for musing on small things and reflecting on larger ones. In other words, a predilection for taking one’s time about the flow of living.
Th is was the lyrical side of the famous Slavic melancholy. But such atmospheres, too, refl ected deeper cultural patterns. It seems possible that, aside from the effects of communism, the slower time of eastern Europe was a feature of a less puritanical climate, of cultures which (for better and for worse) had never developed a full-blown capitalist ethos, or the idea that time is money. Indeed, the idea of excessive ambition, of running after things, seemed vaguely unseemly and undignified. “When man is in a hurry, the devil makes merry,” was an oft-cited (and here roughly translated) proverb of my childhood; and the devil, in those days, was still a personage to reckon with. The word “fate” was often used; and the acknowledgement of that governing force in people’s lives implied a certain receptivity, a willingness to accept things as they are, which we, in our more activist—or will-driven—societies might call passive, or fi nd diffi cult to imagine.
Dislocation exacerbates the consciousness of time. For me, emigration constituted a great interruption, putting paid to the idea that time necessarily unfolds in a continuous, linear way. The past was all of a sudden on the other side of a great divide, preserved in memory but severed from the present. The future was so obscure and veiled as to have no existence. Straightforward temporal coordinates had become scrambled.
Time, in a sense, had stopped flowing and started to assume more jagged forms and rhythms. My experience in this regard was, of course, hardly exceptional. Migrations, mass movements of populations as well as more routine forms of mobility, are among the hallmarks of our epoch and they inform everyone’s consciousness of lived time. It is geo graphical stability and the continuous life narrative which these days constitute the exception, and various forms of discontinuity and fragmentation which are becoming the norm.
But for me, the impact of cultural disruption had more than personal implications. As I continued to live in America and study and work in its institutions, I began to become aware of the deep differences in the constructions of time prevailing between the two worlds I knew. It was not only that time moved faster in America—it pressed onwards in more stressful ways. People worked much harder, of course; but also, it seemed to me, more anxiously. I was witnessing, even if I did not initially realise it, the phenomenon of “American nervousness” which had been a trope of social commentaries ever since the end of the nineteenth century. The nervousness had always been diagnosed as a function of a peculiar American insecurity, underlying the ostensible confidence; an uncertainty which followed perhaps partly from the country’s perpetually renewing newness, but also from the extreme competitiveness of American institutions and the very possibilities of upward mobility. People worked very hard. But even if not everyone used every minute of their working day to be optimally productive—so I noted during my tenure in some major American workplaces— everyone suffered from the stress of not doing enough, or the possibility of doing more, or at least feeling good and guilty about it. (This soon included myself.) It was as if anxiety were the tithe paid to the gods of the work ethic in lieu of more concrete sacrifi ces. After all, everything was at stake in American careers: big promotions, big money, big homes. And if you didn’t succeed in “making it,” as the colloquial phrase had it, you had only yourself to blame.
All of this meant that, on the whole, people were much more strict in their management of time and much less willing to give it away freely or indulge in an errant impulse. The spontaneous response to a friend’s summons, the leisured conversation which did not fit into anything and led nowhere in particular, the protracted silence between people as they let some thought sink in, or simply sat side by side together, all of this was much less likely to occur in the American context. Time needed to be apportioned rationally, with an eye for its yields and gains—even if these were defined as “productive” encounters or conversations.
Th e different attitudes towards time, I gradually realised, required a diff erent organisation not only of one’s Filofax (the period’s time-management device of choice), but of the self and one’s internal arrangements. I learned quite a few things from American time: the merits, in some areas of life, of effi ciency and rigorous schedules; the need, in a busy and complicated life, to know the worth of one’s hours, and to assert one’s temporal rights; the pleasures of pitching the self towards a directed goal, with a plan and a will to carry it through. I continue to value such attitudes, and the particular kind of self-cultivation—the disciplines of self—they encourage. By the time I travelled through eastern Europe in the immediate aft ermath of the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989, I was no longer willing to wait patiently in long queues, and I c...