By Max Dunbar.
Time, Eva Hoffman, Profile 2009
In her fascinating study of time’s impact on the species, Eva Hoffman remembers Swift’s group of immortal elders who illustrated ‘the dreadful Prospect of never dying. They were not only Opinionative, Peevish, Covetous, Morose, Vain, Talkative, but uncapable of Friendship, and dead to all natural Affection… Envy and impotent Desire are their prevailing Passions’.
Hoffman grew up in postwar Poland knowing ‘that life was a provisional condition; that it could be cut arbitrarily; that its finitude was wrested briefly from death’s infinity.’ Cracow was then an economic ruin; no one had any money, there were no opportunities to strive for. Moving to America, Hoffman found a culture of overwork in which people crammed everything into each hour in order to grasp the wealth they saw all around them. As a result, they had little time to enjoy their success. Conversely, although Poland was a far worse place to live (for we’re not going into moral equivalence here) Hoffman felt more free and relaxed because under communism ‘time had no value… 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.’
Humanity is the only species aware of its mortality, and also of its place in time. Animals have procedural memory and hardwired routines. But only we can place ourselves in a certain moment, and derive a sense of self that is nothing more than a sequence of disjointed memories from which we construct a basic narrative. As humanity was the first to fight nature, so we are the first to fight time. Life expectancy in Ancient Rome was something like twenty-five; today there are so many octogenarians that financiers worry that the economy cannot support their pension bills. We have also improved society so that when people get old they at least do it looking a little better and feeling a little more comfortable.
So far though, all we have done is negotiate concessions with time and death. For all of us will still come a time when the clocks run down and our cells stop firing. Death is still the great unknowable. It is certainly the wellspring of all religions, whose selling point in the living world derives from an intellectual position that negates or even welcomes the prospect of dying. There are sects like the Jhershierra Seven Levels School for Mastery and Immortality that just come out with it and publish books called The Resurrected Dead Now Immortal Live Among Us: A Manual for Immortality. Even some fringe scientists promise eternal life. The physicist Frank J Tipler has seriously suggested, in his The Physics of Immortality, that God will one day bring back everyone who has died and make them live forever. Tipler’s God ‘is composed of physical forces, and the workings of time itself’ which at some point ‘will invert itself, and start rewriting the history of our universe, so that everything which has decayed and died will reconstitute itself as it once existed.’ This ‘Omega Point’ theory, perhaps derived from the Big Crunch, is explored with great emotional resonance in Scarlett Thomas’s recent novel Our Tragic Universe.
Hoffman discusses Western capitalism’s strange relationship with time. We all know those moments of hiatus; waiting for a computer to load, standing at a crowded bar, watching the digital clock on a station board. In these periods of impatient inertia you know you’re a creature of time: Chronos has his thumb on the scale of your soul. George Orwell, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, was constantly exasperated by Spain’s cavalier attitude to timekeeping. ‘In theory,’ he wrote, ‘I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our time neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.’
Before the machine age, people lived by the rhythms of their land and of their own bodies: sleep, harvest, plow, dusk, dawn. Time was standardised because the Industrial Revolution needed set working hours. Hoffman tells us that the introduction of time zones in some places enduced ‘vigorous protests… People felt squeezed and cramped by the imposition of grid time onto event time; thrown off their own rhythms and equillibrium; unnaturally hurried and harried.’
Marx said that capitalist exploitation was centred on the ownership of someone else’s labour. As Hoffman explains, it is also about control of someone’s lived time. Nineteenth-century factory workers were made to toil to the point where lack of sleep would have affected their productivity. Many of the great working-class victories over capitalism constituted legal reductions on the amount of time they had to give. From the nineteenth-century union song ‘Eight Hours’:
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will.
Today, Hoffman says, people work harder than they have in the past thirty years, and often employees are reluctant to go home because their home life constitutes an ‘evening shift’ of housework and looking after families. Our ludicrous belief in the nobility of work and the essentiality of reproduction has meant that what little time we have is getting hammered at both ends. At all times we have to be active and productive: sleep, as Hoffman says, has become a ‘guilty pleasure’; not actually illegal, but an indulgence frowned upon. There is a worrying tendency to see sleep as something unnecessary or optional; Hoffman quotes a psychologist who says that ‘You don’t have people trying to get by on less air.’
The impression you get from Hoffman’s book is that what doesn’t die cannot live. Better then to make that life as full and interesting as possible, for anything else is just haggling with Chronos, blinking down at the chessboard, trying to remember how the horse ones move, while the grand master prepares his checkmate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry, and reviews editor of 3:AM.
