Time

September 7, 2009
Time may be life's implacable constant, but it has undergone drastic and troubling revision in the modern age, argues this penetrating essay. Novelist and historian Hoffman (Lost in Translation
) analyzes the simultaneous surfeit and famine of time that faces contemporary society. Our lives, she argues, have grown longer, but we cram ever more work and activity into each multitasking moment. Meanwhile, she contends, technology has chopped up the flow of time into a succession of disjointed nanoseconds, while banishing the natural rhythms of diurnal and seasonal time and depositing us in a frenetic 24/7. Hoffman places the derangement of time at the root of many of modernity's discontents: it underlies the “ethos of conspicuous exertion” that tyrannizes our work lives, she writes, and perhaps induces our growing epidemic of attention deficit disorder, whose symptoms “mimic the pattern of contemporary digital time.” Hoffman's exploration ranges lucidly across neuroscience, psychoanalysis and modernist literature to plumb time's mysteries. Her approach is smart and informed, but also pensive and a bit melancholy, wary of what's lost in trying to manage and optimize time; even time's ravages of decay and death, she warns, are inextricably tied up with the meaning of life.