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Time
Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series
Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever before, we feel that we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyperfast technologies--computers, video games, instant communications--have on our inner lives and even our bodies? And as we examine biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time--from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing--in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life’s essential medium and its contemporary challenges.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
26 people are currently reading
363 people want to read
About the author
Eva Hoffman
69 books102 followersEva Hoffman is a writer and academic. She was born Ewa Wydra July 1, 1945 in Cracow, Poland after her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ukraine. In 1959, during the Cold War, the thirteen years old Eva, her nine years old sister "Alinka" and her parents immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where her name has been changed to Eva. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University, Texas in 1966, the Yale School of Music (1967-68), and Harvard University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1974.
Eva Hoffmann has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as senior editor of “The Book Review” from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Writers' Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman has been the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick. Eva leads a seminar in memoir once every two years as a part of CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
She now lives in London.
Her sister, Dr. Alina Wydra is a registered psychologist working in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Hoffman
Eva Hoffmann has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as senior editor of “The Book Review” from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Writers' Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman has been the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick. Eva leads a seminar in memoir once every two years as a part of CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
She now lives in London.
Her sister, Dr. Alina Wydra is a registered psychologist working in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Hoffman
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
January 12, 2020
Time, written by Eva Hoffman is one of the books in the Big Ideas series in which writers are encouraged to think about our world afresh including politics, our passions and preoccupations, and our ways of seeing the world. They are meant to stir debate ...... let's see if it's worked with myself, and then with YOU!
Time is a fact of our existence, unyielding in its forward march, tick tock, tick tock, never standing still, never moving backwards, always onwards and into the future. And yet, medical research has extended our life spans while computer science and digital innovation has shortened time into nanoseconds. We can travel across and between time zones at the speed of sound, and even exist in them simultaneously via our phones or computers. We work longer hours and yet suffer from "a lack of time".
Eva Hoffman has examined all of these issues in her book organised into four chapters, Time and The Body, Time and The Mind, Time and Culture, Time in Our Time, each calling on aspects of psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, biology and history, so there is something in this book for everyone.
Time and The Body ...
This opening chapter is focused on the physical effects of time, the relationship between time and our bodies. The two areas most discussed are sleep and longevity.
"Some of the causes of endemic sleep shortage have to do with the material conditions or requirements of our lives. [which are time related] Shift work, frequent long-distance travel, the availability of electric light and the incessant activity of cities all contribute to people getting less sleep. The work routines of upscale professionals often call for greatly extended or irregular hours."
"If we want to make sense of our days, if we want to fill them with something more purposeful than mere existence, if we wrestle with our own significance and insignificance, that is because we are conscious of our own impermanence. Myth, religion and philosophy have arisen from the need to reckon with our awareness of mortality. We have created fables of the world’s origins, of the afterlife and of eternity in order to imagine measures of time larger than our own and to counteract the fears of our own ending."
Hoffman's main point is that our physiological requirement for sleep as a "mode of recovery" is governed by time itself which is a function of our personal lifestyle, and that this lifestyle is governed by the interpretation of our own mortality spurring us on to fit more things in to our limited lifespan.
Time and Culture
This was my favourite chapter, surprisingly ahead of Time and the Mind even though as a psychologist and with degrees in chemistry I understood the references to neuroscience. Culture is something we can all identify with, we do it regularly when we travel abroad, away from our own culture with its previously unnoticed influence from and relationship with time. How often have we landed in a foreign country and found the pace of life there different from our own? I've been convinced for a very long time that our holidays in the south of France or in Spain were as much about "the flow of time" as about sunshine and the wine! Then, there are our frequent trips to Kathmandu which I shall mention later. The chapter begins with these words from the author:
"In the initial stages, a child’s sense of time develops through its relations with intimate others ........... adults who already embody within themselves certain patterns of temporality. Those patterns, in turn, reflect and are largely created by culture ...... that system of visible customs and invisible assumptions, unwritten codes and subterranean values which structures, even if we are not overtly aware of it, our perceptions and views of the world. In Western cultures, for example, it is an unwritten but widely understood rule that we need to learn how to show up for an appointment at a mutually agreed time or to arrive for work at the appointed hour"
I guess we all intuitively know this, but it's just the beginning as the rest of the chapter reveals for example, university students who show up for classes whenever they feel like it in Brazil, trains which arrive a day late in India and, in one instance of extreme slowdown, waiting three days for a long-distance phone connection in Nepal. Hoffman extensively describes the work of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant Toward Time’, written in the 1960s:
"Algerian peasant culture ..... has an attitude of submission and of nonchalant indifference to the passage of time which no one dreams of mastering, using up, or saving … All the acts of life are free from the limitations of the timetable, even sleep, even work, which ignores all obsession with productivity and yields. Haste is seen as a lack of decorum, combined with diabolical ambition … A whole art of passing time, or better, of taking one’s time, has been developed here."
The chapter continues highlighting the seeming correlation of "this bucolic attitude towards time" with the peasants absolute lack of control over their static social
circumstances. This is what I have constantly experienced in Nepal, both as a tourist in my wife's homeland, and as the head of an education aid organisation. It is culture and custom that determine and shape individual behaviour because the economic and power levers are weak across the general population. Fatalism rather than futurism is the cultural thread throughout Nepalese society!
I needed two attempts to complete this book. I bought it a couple of years ago because I was interested in the Time-Culture connection and, having read that chapter I then put it down and moved on to something else. Maybe I was short of time! But having now read all of it, on reflection, it's a very good book as a general read, whatever your time of life, your career or your culture. It will open your eyes to your own attitude to time and what is influencing your use of it. I wish I'd read it when I was much younger, but it is certainly influencing me today in making the most of whatever time I have left! I hope you'll read it too.
Across all of these chapters, should you read the book yourselves, you might find it helpful to first familiarise yourself with the two Greek words for time; Chronos and Kairos, it will help you to understand the rationale and significance of each of Hoffman's chapters.
Time is a fact of our existence, unyielding in its forward march, tick tock, tick tock, never standing still, never moving backwards, always onwards and into the future. And yet, medical research has extended our life spans while computer science and digital innovation has shortened time into nanoseconds. We can travel across and between time zones at the speed of sound, and even exist in them simultaneously via our phones or computers. We work longer hours and yet suffer from "a lack of time".
Eva Hoffman has examined all of these issues in her book organised into four chapters, Time and The Body, Time and The Mind, Time and Culture, Time in Our Time, each calling on aspects of psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, biology and history, so there is something in this book for everyone.
Time and The Body ...
This opening chapter is focused on the physical effects of time, the relationship between time and our bodies. The two areas most discussed are sleep and longevity.
"Some of the causes of endemic sleep shortage have to do with the material conditions or requirements of our lives. [which are time related] Shift work, frequent long-distance travel, the availability of electric light and the incessant activity of cities all contribute to people getting less sleep. The work routines of upscale professionals often call for greatly extended or irregular hours."
"If we want to make sense of our days, if we want to fill them with something more purposeful than mere existence, if we wrestle with our own significance and insignificance, that is because we are conscious of our own impermanence. Myth, religion and philosophy have arisen from the need to reckon with our awareness of mortality. We have created fables of the world’s origins, of the afterlife and of eternity in order to imagine measures of time larger than our own and to counteract the fears of our own ending."
Hoffman's main point is that our physiological requirement for sleep as a "mode of recovery" is governed by time itself which is a function of our personal lifestyle, and that this lifestyle is governed by the interpretation of our own mortality spurring us on to fit more things in to our limited lifespan.
Time and Culture
This was my favourite chapter, surprisingly ahead of Time and the Mind even though as a psychologist and with degrees in chemistry I understood the references to neuroscience. Culture is something we can all identify with, we do it regularly when we travel abroad, away from our own culture with its previously unnoticed influence from and relationship with time. How often have we landed in a foreign country and found the pace of life there different from our own? I've been convinced for a very long time that our holidays in the south of France or in Spain were as much about "the flow of time" as about sunshine and the wine! Then, there are our frequent trips to Kathmandu which I shall mention later. The chapter begins with these words from the author:
"In the initial stages, a child’s sense of time develops through its relations with intimate others ........... adults who already embody within themselves certain patterns of temporality. Those patterns, in turn, reflect and are largely created by culture ...... that system of visible customs and invisible assumptions, unwritten codes and subterranean values which structures, even if we are not overtly aware of it, our perceptions and views of the world. In Western cultures, for example, it is an unwritten but widely understood rule that we need to learn how to show up for an appointment at a mutually agreed time or to arrive for work at the appointed hour"
I guess we all intuitively know this, but it's just the beginning as the rest of the chapter reveals for example, university students who show up for classes whenever they feel like it in Brazil, trains which arrive a day late in India and, in one instance of extreme slowdown, waiting three days for a long-distance phone connection in Nepal. Hoffman extensively describes the work of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant Toward Time’, written in the 1960s:
"Algerian peasant culture ..... has an attitude of submission and of nonchalant indifference to the passage of time which no one dreams of mastering, using up, or saving … All the acts of life are free from the limitations of the timetable, even sleep, even work, which ignores all obsession with productivity and yields. Haste is seen as a lack of decorum, combined with diabolical ambition … A whole art of passing time, or better, of taking one’s time, has been developed here."
The chapter continues highlighting the seeming correlation of "this bucolic attitude towards time" with the peasants absolute lack of control over their static social
circumstances. This is what I have constantly experienced in Nepal, both as a tourist in my wife's homeland, and as the head of an education aid organisation. It is culture and custom that determine and shape individual behaviour because the economic and power levers are weak across the general population. Fatalism rather than futurism is the cultural thread throughout Nepalese society!
I needed two attempts to complete this book. I bought it a couple of years ago because I was interested in the Time-Culture connection and, having read that chapter I then put it down and moved on to something else. Maybe I was short of time! But having now read all of it, on reflection, it's a very good book as a general read, whatever your time of life, your career or your culture. It will open your eyes to your own attitude to time and what is influencing your use of it. I wish I'd read it when I was much younger, but it is certainly influencing me today in making the most of whatever time I have left! I hope you'll read it too.
Across all of these chapters, should you read the book yourselves, you might find it helpful to first familiarise yourself with the two Greek words for time; Chronos and Kairos, it will help you to understand the rationale and significance of each of Hoffman's chapters.
May 26, 2017
I have enjoyed book enormous, falling in love with Eva’s elegant writing style. She has divided her book into four main sections, addressing time question to our biology, our minds, our cultures and to our time in time.
In the first part, she discusses an intriguing question of the termination of our time on Earth or, simply saying, our death. The high level of fear and awareness of our inevitable end tortures people so much that they search for new ways of slowing down the processes of aging. The only way to slow it down is to cease the metabolism which biologically means death and is fully opposite to what we call life. Thus, in order to feel oneself alive it is important to let time go through one’s body including aging, illnesses and death.
In the second par, Eva introduces concepts of ”hurry sickness” and ”time poverty”, which are becoming part of common sociological usage nowadays. Life in crazy speed provokes a series of different pathologies. In order to avoid stresses, psychological disorders and anxiety, some people have started to perform oriental religious practices. At certain intense stages of meditation, a person’s attention is so fully turned towards internal states that the awareness of time disappears almost entirely. This may be scientific confirmation of the possibility of achieving cognitive timelessness. In this sense, the sight inward can help to keep the balance.
In the third part of the book, Eva puts an interesting parallel between steady growing extremism and late-modern acceleration of time. She explains that post-modern religious orthodoxies create alternative temporalities as the result of ever faster rotating time flow. The attraction of such strategies is clear, engaging steady growing group of people pathologically underachieving the Western life rhythm. However, the psychic escapism has a dangerous side – extremism, and following intolerance, ethnic cleansing and military campaigns.
Another interesting analysis, which the author performs in the book, is the interconnection between time and information. Todays all imaginable sources of information are digital. We receive a constant succession of disconnected data from all corners of the world. In such insane pace of data flow, there is no time to consider things, to search for relationships between events and facts. We rely on professionals in their analysis since we don’t have time to think about a link into the longer and deeper time of history.
Eva discusses the problem where we have as a habit to store information on the digital devices, where do not rely on our memory anymore. She gives interesting examples from the recent history, when people had to rely on their own memories. For example, Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of famous Russian poet who was imprisoned for the expression of freedom in his poesy, memorised all of her husband’s poetry because it was too hazardous to write it down. Solzhenitsyn committed to memory each page he wrote when he was imprisoned in the Gulag, and then destroyed the evidence.
She finishes the book with an idea that we need to accept our own temporal limits if we want to keep deep sense of our humanity.
If you interested in reading her amazing book, I would recommend listening her presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnqd9...
In the first part, she discusses an intriguing question of the termination of our time on Earth or, simply saying, our death. The high level of fear and awareness of our inevitable end tortures people so much that they search for new ways of slowing down the processes of aging. The only way to slow it down is to cease the metabolism which biologically means death and is fully opposite to what we call life. Thus, in order to feel oneself alive it is important to let time go through one’s body including aging, illnesses and death.
In the second par, Eva introduces concepts of ”hurry sickness” and ”time poverty”, which are becoming part of common sociological usage nowadays. Life in crazy speed provokes a series of different pathologies. In order to avoid stresses, psychological disorders and anxiety, some people have started to perform oriental religious practices. At certain intense stages of meditation, a person’s attention is so fully turned towards internal states that the awareness of time disappears almost entirely. This may be scientific confirmation of the possibility of achieving cognitive timelessness. In this sense, the sight inward can help to keep the balance.
In the third part of the book, Eva puts an interesting parallel between steady growing extremism and late-modern acceleration of time. She explains that post-modern religious orthodoxies create alternative temporalities as the result of ever faster rotating time flow. The attraction of such strategies is clear, engaging steady growing group of people pathologically underachieving the Western life rhythm. However, the psychic escapism has a dangerous side – extremism, and following intolerance, ethnic cleansing and military campaigns.
Another interesting analysis, which the author performs in the book, is the interconnection between time and information. Todays all imaginable sources of information are digital. We receive a constant succession of disconnected data from all corners of the world. In such insane pace of data flow, there is no time to consider things, to search for relationships between events and facts. We rely on professionals in their analysis since we don’t have time to think about a link into the longer and deeper time of history.
Eva discusses the problem where we have as a habit to store information on the digital devices, where do not rely on our memory anymore. She gives interesting examples from the recent history, when people had to rely on their own memories. For example, Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of famous Russian poet who was imprisoned for the expression of freedom in his poesy, memorised all of her husband’s poetry because it was too hazardous to write it down. Solzhenitsyn committed to memory each page he wrote when he was imprisoned in the Gulag, and then destroyed the evidence.
She finishes the book with an idea that we need to accept our own temporal limits if we want to keep deep sense of our humanity.
If you interested in reading her amazing book, I would recommend listening her presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnqd9...
March 15, 2012
We all have different perceptions of time and Eva Hoffman's book describes the various influences: biological, cultural, technological. It is a fascinating look into how we are creatures of time even though we try to manipulate it and make it work for us. For example, I never considered that we perceive time through the looking glass of mortality. Without our inevitable demise, we wouldn't be able to enjoy moments and appreciate our lives for what they are.
Hoffman gives excellent examples of time from literature, academia, and philosophy and she is very thoughtful. She makes complex concepts accessible without making them boring. The one thing I wished she had expanded upon was how music "is the medium most capable of expressing all aspects and dimensions of both measurable external time and subjective lived temporality" (p. 187). The conclusion was thoughtful (not to say anything less of the rest of the book, which was also just as thought-provoking), but I think I probably could have read a whole book on music and time perception.
It is definitely a quick read, but also requires some rumination and reflection (which of course I think is the aim of the book).
Hoffman gives excellent examples of time from literature, academia, and philosophy and she is very thoughtful. She makes complex concepts accessible without making them boring. The one thing I wished she had expanded upon was how music "is the medium most capable of expressing all aspects and dimensions of both measurable external time and subjective lived temporality" (p. 187). The conclusion was thoughtful (not to say anything less of the rest of the book, which was also just as thought-provoking), but I think I probably could have read a whole book on music and time perception.
It is definitely a quick read, but also requires some rumination and reflection (which of course I think is the aim of the book).
January 19, 2015
Set myself a target of reading 12 books this year (at least), one per month, and I thought it'd be a good idea to delve into some more non-fiction types of books and being particularly interested in the nature of time (shaped by my LOVE for Interstellar and the feelings of transience I was feeling after finishing schooling) this was a really solid read covering a large breadth of how time shapes our lives (if only I could cover such breadth in my essays too!) and Hoffman's writing is extremely intricate though at times it felt that her ideas were a little all over the place and it took a couple of re-reads of certain pages to fully grasp some concepts. But that aside, a riveting read and extremely thought-provoking - highly recommended :)
December 6, 2010
The reviews of this book at Amazon are atrocious, but I found it quite an interesting read. Contemplating time from the perspective of subjective experience, body and mind, as well as culture and "time in our time," Hoffman questions and speculates freely on the nature of time, the perception of time, and how technology is altering how we experience time.
Perhaps not the most profound contemplation, but still one that I found interesting and thought-provoking. We all live in time, and yet give it fairly superficial attention. This book may prod others to a deeper investigation of the very medium we live in.
Perhaps not the most profound contemplation, but still one that I found interesting and thought-provoking. We all live in time, and yet give it fairly superficial attention. This book may prod others to a deeper investigation of the very medium we live in.
February 4, 2020
A philosophy of time, how it changes us, and how we change it. There was a certain amount of plowing on my part to get through this, but that is not to say I didn't like it or appreciate it. Time is a tough concept to get onto the page, and so far, Hoffman has done it best for me.
You'll read how time is handled differently from culture to culture, from generation to generation, and within your own body. How the elephant and the mouse have different time concepts, how time is measured in space. It's a book to be tasted, a paragraph at a time...or maybe read again someday. Someday.
You'll read how time is handled differently from culture to culture, from generation to generation, and within your own body. How the elephant and the mouse have different time concepts, how time is measured in space. It's a book to be tasted, a paragraph at a time...or maybe read again someday. Someday.
October 2, 2010
A brilliant philosopher who really got me thinking about time, particularly multi-tasking versus focused thought, relativity, death, the lifespan of the blueberry bush - and more! Wonderful read.
May 13, 2012
It is a big idea that doesn't disappoint because she approaches time with time.
July 1, 2014
Fascinating ideas on time.
July 3, 2018
I don't often pick up such books of essays but got it from the library on a whim but loved it. Most of the stuff is known but very well written.
May 21, 2017
Is time subjective or objective? Is time a useful construct of our mind to organize our temporal existence or does time exist in nature, the universe?
The answer is: both. Nature, life, our physical body, the sheer neurological mechanics of our brain, operate on a schedule. Time is, therefore, built into us. It is linear, one-directional, and we cannot go forward or backward in time.
But, we could travel in time in our mind. Our personal identity, - whom we presume to be or want to be as individuals - depends on memory, on hope. On the one hand, we are biologically limited by our brain that is actually, physically, chemically takes shape as we grow and develop and experience life events, positive and negative feelings. On the other hand, in order to grow and develop, and become experienced (that is, accomplished), our mind also imposes a temporal regimen that, however imperfectly, negotiates our individual experience of time within the context of the general culture that molds our sense of time and how to experience time.
Eva Hoffman's Time confronts the problem of cultural insensitivity of modern technologically advanced fast-paced, unyielding competitiveness and the "survival of the fastest" vis-a-vis cultures that have another conception of how to experience time, spending time at work, in leisure, etc.
Even in progressive urban centers symbolizing the oft=repeated "diversity" in the United States, in particular, the root of the problem is aggressive, self-fixated hubris, when the cultural sense of time becomes synonymous with an almost immutable biological time that is built into us, leaving behind just the veneer of self-congratulated, self-promotional "diversity."
The answer is: both. Nature, life, our physical body, the sheer neurological mechanics of our brain, operate on a schedule. Time is, therefore, built into us. It is linear, one-directional, and we cannot go forward or backward in time.
But, we could travel in time in our mind. Our personal identity, - whom we presume to be or want to be as individuals - depends on memory, on hope. On the one hand, we are biologically limited by our brain that is actually, physically, chemically takes shape as we grow and develop and experience life events, positive and negative feelings. On the other hand, in order to grow and develop, and become experienced (that is, accomplished), our mind also imposes a temporal regimen that, however imperfectly, negotiates our individual experience of time within the context of the general culture that molds our sense of time and how to experience time.
Eva Hoffman's Time confronts the problem of cultural insensitivity of modern technologically advanced fast-paced, unyielding competitiveness and the "survival of the fastest" vis-a-vis cultures that have another conception of how to experience time, spending time at work, in leisure, etc.
Even in progressive urban centers symbolizing the oft=repeated "diversity" in the United States, in particular, the root of the problem is aggressive, self-fixated hubris, when the cultural sense of time becomes synonymous with an almost immutable biological time that is built into us, leaving behind just the veneer of self-congratulated, self-promotional "diversity."
December 22, 2024
The slower time of Eastern Europe was in part due to those countries never developed a full blown capitalistic ethos, or the idea that time is money.
Cultural attitudes towards time can have far reaching implications for the way we live.
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Time has become a more valuable and less attainable commodity than money.
Time has been increasingly manipulated through technological communication and jet travel.
Humans have the ability to conceive the existence of time beyond the present moment.
Our perception of time can be arrested and seemingly at a standstill due to clinical factors.
Trauma can freeze time by blocking access to events in the past.
Time appears a s a result of our actions and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it.
Time like language mediates between interior experience and the external world.
The question is not what time is it but what kind of time it is.
Cultural attitudes towards time can have far reaching implications for the way we live.
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Time has become a more valuable and less attainable commodity than money.
Time has been increasingly manipulated through technological communication and jet travel.
Humans have the ability to conceive the existence of time beyond the present moment.
Our perception of time can be arrested and seemingly at a standstill due to clinical factors.
Trauma can freeze time by blocking access to events in the past.
Time appears a s a result of our actions and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it.
Time like language mediates between interior experience and the external world.
The question is not what time is it but what kind of time it is.
June 21, 2024
An interesting multi-disciplinary look at how we experience time, with Hoffman dipping into subjects like literature, philosophy, culture, technology, etc. It's a small book, but it really made me stop and think, especially about time in relation to the way modern life demands that we cram as much as possible into every second, creating the feeling that there's never enough time. I wasn't surprised at all that she made mention of Proust in relation to time and memory - he always ends up being referenced in books like these. This was a good brain-chewy read I might dip into again.
July 31, 2018
An interesting view on what time actually is and how societies depend on it in very different ways.
May 6, 2019
Dnf 25%
Deeply Eurocentric and unawares.
Universal “we”.
Eye rolling prose style.
Deeply Eurocentric and unawares.
Universal “we”.
Eye rolling prose style.
Read
May 30, 2020The last chapter was my favorite.
July 15, 2023
Wonderful book full of interesting musings and reflections on time. One to take time over!
October 21, 2009
I wanted to like this book and tried to force myself to, but just couldn't do it. I've never read anything like this before and thought it might be interesting prior to picking it up, and it could have been interesting for a couple reasons - if Eva Hoffman's writing wasn't all over the place and if the analysis didn't fly right over my head. It's frustrating.
I admit that time is an intriguing topic, but the way it's presented doesn't do it for me. I tip my cap to Hoffman for writing so thoughtfully and analytically, but her vocabulary and prose is too advanced for me. Granted that's my problem, but it made retaining information difficult.
Hoffman confesses she has always been preoccupied with time, and that's great, but I need to be lead into the topic like I'm a two year-old. She leaps right into chronophobia, philosophy, and other stuff I can't remember because I was so overwhelmed... and this was only the introduction! The rest of the book is split into four lengthy chapters - body, mind, culture, and our time - and it's more of a collection of essays targeted for the intellectual. Time is better suited for a college course rather than a bedtime read.
I admit that time is an intriguing topic, but the way it's presented doesn't do it for me. I tip my cap to Hoffman for writing so thoughtfully and analytically, but her vocabulary and prose is too advanced for me. Granted that's my problem, but it made retaining information difficult.
Hoffman confesses she has always been preoccupied with time, and that's great, but I need to be lead into the topic like I'm a two year-old. She leaps right into chronophobia, philosophy, and other stuff I can't remember because I was so overwhelmed... and this was only the introduction! The rest of the book is split into four lengthy chapters - body, mind, culture, and our time - and it's more of a collection of essays targeted for the intellectual. Time is better suited for a college course rather than a bedtime read.
January 16, 2015
The one thing this book succeeded in doing was to suggest an outline for approaches that one might take to its subject. Not entirely Hoffman's fault-- it was a ridiculous task, to gloss all significant aspects of why "Time" is a subject of interest within a brief introductory book. The result is a tossed salad in which a wide range of interesting issues come into view briefly, are briefly wrestled with in a cursory manner, and then dropped. Hoffman tries to deal with views of Time in contemporary physics, how Time impacts our biological processes and the psychology of our perceptions of the Time and the significance of Time as a core motif (indeed the defining motif) of Modernity. Yeah, all in about 100 pages.
I'm a bit obsessed with time travel, largely because I have ambitions to write my own time travel adventure one of these days. I'll get around to writing my review of why I hated The Time Traveler's Wife another time. Suffice to say, that I'm glad for the headlines and the bibliography from Hoffman, but there wasn't much in the actual text of the book that will stick with me.
I'm a bit obsessed with time travel, largely because I have ambitions to write my own time travel adventure one of these days. I'll get around to writing my review of why I hated The Time Traveler's Wife another time. Suffice to say, that I'm glad for the headlines and the bibliography from Hoffman, but there wasn't much in the actual text of the book that will stick with me.
October 15, 2009
I just really love this book, regardless of the fact that I am working with Eva! It made me think hard about what is more important: working like a dog by extending the work day to 24/7 via blackberries, etc. or enjoying true quality time with my family (and myself) by disconnecting often and without guilt? I'll choose the latter. Thank you, Eva. :)
April 3, 2010
An intelligent, well-written, and interesting survey on the notion of Time. After the introduction, Hoffman categorizes her overview: Time and the body, time and the mind, time and culture, and time in our time. Each chapter is intriguing, but it is the last that examines this culture's accelerated temporal craziness.
Recommended for all those who ponder what the fuck "time" actually is.
Recommended for all those who ponder what the fuck "time" actually is.
April 16, 2017
This is really interesting. It's all about how our bodies and minds process and understand time, and also takes a cultural and historical perspective. It fuses neuroscience, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature to take a deep look at something which at first may seem everyday and mundane, but in fact encompasses all the big questions of life and mortality.
April 4, 2016
"Rather, we seem to be driven by being driven. This is no longer the work ethic but the ethos of conspicuous exertion, and under its aegis we willing submit ourselves to temporal regimes that would have seemed rigid or even tyrannical by the standards of most other places and periods."
June 20, 2011
Things to think about, enjoyable readingOrdinary Thunderstorms
September 6, 2012
I had to read this for a class, really didn't like it because of her human-centric arguments.
December 1, 2019
The only reason I could imagine people gving this book 1 star is they don't get it
April 15, 2010
Extremely well-written long essay on time. Makes you think...
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