A big blue dragonfly sunned itself on a rock to my left in the garden. I was close enough to see that its transparent wings were minutely interlaced with dark veins, like miniature stained-glass windows. Everywhere on the lawn, pollen-dusted bees were visiting clover flowers, and several iridescent green flies with impossibly long, angled legs, were sunning on blades of grass. I saw an ant carrying a winged seed twice its size. At the ant’s scale, the grass might as well have been a bamboo jungle. It tugged purposefully at its load and kept a remarkably straight path through the grass. Just then, a trio of small insects—flies or wasps, I couldn’t tell—flew over my head from behind me and zoomed at grass-tip level towards the garage. They were going so quickly I could barely track them, and it was only because they were flying down the axis of my perspective that I could see what they were up to. All three were tumbling through the air like miniature jet fighters. They hovered and plunged and dove at each other like tiny top guns as they rocketed forwards. The whole nimble flyover must have taken only half a second, and then they vanished.
To them I must have seemed as slow as an elephant or a beached whale, and I couldn’t help but imagine that their relative time frame was much, much faster than mine. Those flies seemed like aerial Femtonians. Whenever an animal is fast, you can bet that neurons, the communicative cells that make up our own nervous system and brain, are involved. Plants, which have no neurons, are some of the slowest organisms on the planet. Worms, with their basic nervous systems, are speed demons compared to plants, but arthropods, particularly insects, are very fast. In terms of manoeuvrability, speed and complexity, evolution hasn’t really improved too much on insects. Even the mongoose, which can outrace the cobra’s strike, has difficulty snatching a fly out of the air.
If speed depends on neurons, then mammals must be the speediest animals of all. And in a way, they are. A cat may not have quicker reactions than a fly, but it uses its additional neurons to predict where the fly will go and intercepts it there. Mammals can be extraordinarily fast. A bat can fly through the whirling blades of a fan, and a cheetah can sprint at over sixty miles per hour. We humans are not as fast as cheetahs, or as agile as bats, but we don’t have to be. Our brains have the most effective concentration of neurons in the animal kingdom. There are other mammals with bigger brains and more neurons—elephants and dolphins, to name two—but human brains seem to be more efficiently interconnected. They allow us to think ahead, to take duration and speed one step faster. They allow us to collapse time.
We are beings who stand outside and within time. Time is our tool and our medium. No other living thing measures and calculates it so precisely as we do. Even before clocks, we knew, by observing the cyclical patterns of the seasons, exactly when to plant our crops, when to harvest, when to prepare for winter weather. By anticipating the future as well as holding on to our past with stories and monuments, we exist outside of the present moment, the moment in which most animals live out their lives. Despite the fact that some of the most spiritually enlightened religions on the planet admonish us to spend more time in the present moment, not existing in the present moment is an intrinsically human trait, at least since we have become technological. We use time like a map; we can point to where we have been and we can plan where we are going. We are cartographers of time. Ever since the advent of language, storytellers have transported us to the past, and soothsayers, like reconnaissance scouts, have glimpsed the future.
But if we are creatures of time, we are also slaves to it. When we began to allocate time, time became an obstacle between us and our desires. Many of the tasks that we perform every day seem tedious because they take so much time. I never have enough of it. I’m always five minutes late for appointments, I’m continually juggling time between my children, friends, errands, chores and deadlines. To top it all off, lately I’ve been neglecting to put on my wristwatch. It feels like a slave-band, or like the radio anklets that prisoners on restricted parole have to wear. And there are always the tedious little routines that have to be repeated every day—dressing and undressing, opening and closing drawers, putting out and putting away dishes. I find flossing and brushing my teeth at the end of the evening a monumentally dreary business.
To rein in my impatience, I sometimes imagine a parallel life in a community on the edge of the Sahara Desert. There, I live in a small village where each day I have to trek an hour and a half in the hot sun to a water well. At the well I fill four five-gallon plastic containers and then carry them back at the ends of long poles perched on my shoulders. Many times along the way, I’m forced to put down the load and massage my aching shoulders. Compared to those three imagined hours spent on such a menial task, the actual five minutes I have to spend in a bank lineup seem like nothing.
Yet psychological studies of people of limited means living in Third World countries report them as being generally happier. How is it that a culture without all the time-saving devices we have—the washing machines, acronyms, keyboard commands, dishwashers, time-sharing and multi-tasking—end up having more time for family and being more content? There’s a kind of law at work here, something like the law of income and spending: no matter how high your income, your spending will always rise to equal it. We use our time savers not to create leisure time but to fit in even more appointments, more cellphone calls, more résumé updates, more appointments, more professional-development seminars, more time spent listening to the menu options on automated phone services, scanning electronics manuals or downloading software upgrades, movies and music.
At a dinner party the other night, a friend told me that time seemed to be going faster. Things he used to have time for a couple of years ago were now rushed. “Time’s speeding up,” he said. I’ve experienced the same thing. Some days time is sluggish, other days it’s fast. But, of course, time can’t speed up or slow down, at least for us, here on planet earth. Certainly there are places in the universe where time is quicker or slower than the average, but here it’s pretty consistent. Anyway, even if time were faster or slower, we’d never know it because local time always flows at the same rate relative to itself. If time seemed to be going faster for my friend, it could only be because he was slowing down. I said to my friend, “It isn’t time speeding up, it’s us slowing down.”
William S. Burroughs, the American beat writer, would have disagreed with me. He claimed to have experienced a quantitative alteration of time in the mid-1950s, while he was in Tangiers writing Naked Lunch. Upon his arrival in Tangiers he rented an apartment, and by the middle of the first year he had fallen into a schedule that persisted throughout his time there. He rose late and had his breakfast, then visited a few local shops to buy necessities and food. After stocking his apartment he had coffee or an early-afternoon drink at one of the many cafés in Tangiers. In the evenings he wrote. This routine was interrupted once a month by an afternoon visit to the American Express office, where Burroughs’ family stipend was waiting for him. He would get there well before the office closed to collect his money.
As the years passed, Burroughs claimed that he noticed a disturbing trend. Although his routine remained constant—he got up at the same time, he did his errands as usual—the afternoons seemed to go faster. This trend continued until, one day, he arrived at the American Express office and it was closed. Looking at his watch, he was amazed to see that it was already after 5:00 p.m. What had happened to the time? The leisurely pace of his afternoons had been taken from him. Increasingly, it seemed that he had to rush through his errands; he barely had time to shop before the stores closed. What was going on?
He came up with an ingenious explanation. He claimed that an alien civilization, whose sun was about to explode and destroy its home planet, had discovered a way of sucking time from other regions of the universe in order to buy more for itself. Looking deep into space, the aliens discovered earth, fat with excess time. They began siphoning off our hours just after Burroughs moved to Tangiers. No wonder his days felt shorter. (M
y guess is that his heroin addiction slowed him down a little, but you have to give him points for a great alibi.)
I have my own problems. Try as I might, I cannot get out of my house sooner than two hours after I wake up. Other people don’t need this much time, so I decided to write down my morning schedule and analyze why it takes me so long. I usually get up at 8:30 a.m., turn down my sheets to air them, put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, then wash my face and shave. That takes twelve minutes. By 8:42 I’m downstairs. I open the blinds, look in the mailbox and go to the kitchen. Two minutes. Eight forty-four finds me drinking orange juice and putting away last night’s dishes. Now it’s 8:52. I listen to my phone messages. Three minutes, unless I have to answer one immediately.
For the next twelve minutes I prepare breakfast: a bowl of cereal with fresh slices of banana and mango. I also put coffee and some water into the coffee maker. But I don’t eat breakfast right away. I eat it after my exercises. At 9:06 I’m doing stretches and weights in the living room. Six minutes. Then I finish my juice, take some vitamins and go jogging. My route winds through a neighbourhood park and several blocks around my house. Fifteen minutes. At 9:32 I start the coffee maker, go upstairs, shower, wash my hair and dress. Eleven minutes. Back downstairs I start eating breakfast. Now it’s 9:44. After I pour a coffee it’s 9:52. Breakfast, unrushed, took eight minutes. I wash the dishes in four minutes flat.
I take the coffee upstairs to my study and turn on my computer. My computer requires a minute and a half just to load the desktop icons. I log on to my email account and read my new messages. This takes ten minutes, usually. If I have to respond immediately to an email, I’m there longer. I look up at the clock: it’s 10:07. I finish my coffee and go to the bathroom to blow-dry my hair and brush my teeth. Five minutes there, now it’s 10:12. If I had to leave now for an appointment, I’d go downstairs, gather my keys, wallet, cellphone and whatever else I needed and head out. That takes another four minutes. By 10:17 I’d be in the garage and putting my things in the car before opening up the garage door (it’s manual), moving the car out of the garage and then reclosing the door. It would now be 10:21. A record. One phone call, a complicated email, and that departure time could easily be pushed to 10:41.
On a good morning I can begin work in my study at 11:00, and on an interrupted morning, by 11:45. On the days I’m not teaching I work for four hours in the afternoon—though, if I have any errands to do (grocery shopping, bookstore visits, research), I try to leave the house by 1:30 p.m. to get a few things done before rush hour, which starts at 3:00 p.m. and can add as much as an hour to any trip. “Take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves,” Lord Chesterfield said. But the fact remains, given my morning routine, I really can only trim a few minutes off here and there.
I have a self-winding dress watch that I wear for formal occasions. It will run for a few days after I take it off, but it has almost always stopped by the time I put it on again. There is a little magnifying lens built into the crystal that enlarges the tiny date window. The date is usually a week or two behind. To advance it by a single day I have to pull out the crown and twirl the hour and minute hands through an entire twenty-four-hour cycle. If the watch is one or two weeks behind, twirling the crown is a laborious, finger-cramping exercise. But I don’t find it tedious. I use it as a memory test. In my mind’s eye I go through all those days and hours, visualizing what I was doing at 2:00 p.m., then 3:00, then 4:00 p.m. and so on, right through each day in succession.
Because of my familiarity with fast-forwarding DVDs, the exercise is not only easy, it’s also kind of fun. I see myself rocketing out of bed, dashing around the house and leaping out the door and into my car. My drive to the university is more like the Grand Prix. I teach frantically, gesturing and pacing like someone on amphetamines, then zoom downtown to meet my hyper-animated friends for a frenzied restaurant dinner. After speeding home I sit fidgeting in front of the television for a few seconds, then race to the bathroom, run down the hall and bound into bed, lights out. I thrash around under the covers for a while, then the windows brighten and I’m up again to repeat the process.
DOING TIME
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
—Oscar Wilde
Although most of us don’t share Wilde’s particular anguish, we are all prisoners of time, sentenced by the necessities of life and urban congestion. The difference is that we don’t serve our sentences consecutively but in small portions. In a lifetime the average North American spends over nine months commuting, two years shopping and two more years cooking and washing up. Twenty-seven years are given over to sleeping, four years to eating, and twenty to working. Five months are spent talking on the phone, which pales beside the five and a half years spent watching television. Three long months are wasted waiting for someone. But it isn’t all tedium. Given a fifty-five-year-long active sex life, the average person will spend four blissful months having sex.
One of the obvious ways of gaining more time, of slowing down the speed of the world around us, is to squeeze more time out of the hours we have. If you can do in five minutes something that takes others ten minutes, you prevail, you get there faster. Nowhere is that more apparent than in sports, particularly at the Olympic level. The difference between gold and silver can be measured in hundredths of a second, though at such infinitesimal increments it seems to me that our ability to measure small amounts of time has become an abstract, cruel taskmaster, extracting winners and losers from almost equal performances. All athletes excel at doing something fast, and their complex physical accomplishments are the result of a special kind of intelligence.
For sports, music and any activity that requires the co-ordination of hundreds of muscles, our brains have a clever assistant called the cerebellum. A knot of grey matter located at the back of the brain, the cerebellum is dedicated solely to storing the memories of complex movements. We train our cerebellum when, for instance, we learn to walk, ride a bicycle or play arpeggios on the piano. The cerebellum allows us to do things that call for lightning-fast reflexes, by re-enacting the exact sequences unconsciously. Playing an arpeggio on the piano, one of the most complex and quick of all human achievements, involves a series of finger motions well beyond the normal human reaction time of .02 seconds, but it’s possible because all the fingering sequences are preloaded, as it were, in the cerebellum.
Yet our mind, the cortex, has no such accomplice. We may be able to train ourselves to think more quickly and clearly, but there are limits to what we can fit into a week. For most of us, just juggling our careers and lives is so complicated and demanding that if we can muddle through a day, no less a year, we feel as if we’ve accomplished something. To try to speed up my day, I recently consulted a free website on time management. It told me—not surprisingly—to prioritize. I should organize all my tasks into four categories: important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important but urgent, and not important and not urgent.
The key, the site suggested, was to learn to say no to tasks in the last two categories in order to free up more time for tasks in the first two. But I’m a master of deferral. It’s like the oldjoke, “I’ve got a procrastination problem that, one day, I’m going to do something about.” Pinned to my cork bulletin board in the kitchen is a list of household jobs that has been posted there for years. The top three are: repair the back fence, put silicone sealer in the gap between the baseboard and the floor in the front bedroom, and replace the screws on the French-door hinge in the living room. I suppose these fall under the “not important and not urgent” category, though if I ignore them long enough, they will become urgent. The time-management site understands this. According to it, the “not important” tasks have a “tendency to become emergencies if they are neglected.” If you drive a car, you’re probably familiar with that effect. There’s never enough time to stop by a g
as station and fill up, but if you don’t, eventually you’ll run out. The bottom line seems to be do it all—just do it all in order.
Okay, but what about the things that aren’t so easy to schedule? The marriage that is on the rocks and doesn’t know it, or the torrid affair that any day might erupt into a scandal. How do you fit the fallout from these catastrophes into your day-planner? The heart, it seems, will not be time-managed. And what about finding some time for yourself? Time to think, to contemplate. I once heard a poet say that for a writer the perfect ratio of contemplative time to work time is three to one: three hours of what, to the casual observer, would appear to be puttering around, going on walks, perusing the wares in second-hand stores or simply standing at windows and staring vacantly out, to one hour of sitting down at the computer and writing. This is because, he claimed, all writers need downtime for their unconscious minds to consolidate the complexities of their current work. That way, when they do sit down to write, the writing flows easily. “It takes a lot of time being a genius,” Gertrude Stein once quipped. “You have to sit around so much doing nothing.”
Soul of the World Page 12
