Reviews for Time: Big Ideas, Small Books

The average rating for Time: Big Ideas, Small Books based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-05-26 00:00:00 Caitlin Stewart 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:

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-12 00:00:00 Andrea Wylan 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.