Time

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. Eva Hoffman is the author of "Lost in Translation: A Life In A New Language, Shtetl, "and "The Secret. "Her essays and journalism have appeared in "The New York Times, The Atlantic," "The Yale Review," and other publications.

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. More every day, time can be tampered with in ways that affect how we live, the textures of experience, and the sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in "this" time? Why is it that even as humans live longer than ever before, it seems as though 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 bodies? By examining 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. "Hoffman examines this philosophically fraught subject in unpretentious, clear chapters: asking how time affects our bodies, our minds, our cultures, and, finally, how time has accelerated and changed with the advent of the concept of 'immediacy'--or, as she puts it, 'what pace and density of stimulus we need in order to feel that something 'interesting' is happening.'"--Benjamin Moser, "Harper's"

"'When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second, ' Albert Einstein said, by way of explaining relativity. 'When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour.' Such a notion resonates throughout Eva Hoffman's slender reflection on the chronological conundrum, "Time" . . . Writing about Freud, who believed 'not only that our ephemeral nature has to be accepted, but that it is a guarantee of human meaning, ' she cites his meeting with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, 'who experienced a terror of mortality and who disconsolately felt that the transience of all things human meant that, ultimately, they had no value; they didn't count.' Here, she deftly dramatizes the essential contradiction: How do we find meaning in what doesn't last? . . . Of course, if making sense of our days is ultimately what time--and "Time"--is about, we face new challenges amid the acceleration of contemporary life, where ' s]peed becomes its own self-justifying value.' In the last of her book's four sections, Hoffman considers where this leaves us, returning, not surprisingly, to the ethos of slowness with which she was raised. ' I]f we do not want to live meaninglessly, ' she suggests, 'then we need to give ourselves over sometimes to the time of inwardness and contemplation, to empathy and aesthetic wonder. We need to mull and muse, to reflect on our experience and interpret it. . . . We need occasionally to go with the flow.' Hoffman's right, for without that stillness, that reflection, we lose a key component of our humanity. It may be true that we live in time, but time lives within us also, moving through us as we move through it. We define it, for ourselves and for our culture; we decide to what we want to turn our minds. That, I suppose, makes for another kind of relativity, regardless of whether we find meaning in the moment or choose to live unreconciled."--David L. Ulin, "Los Angeles"" Times
""This book is something of a departure for Hoffman, who is best known for her writing on the Polish-Jewish community in which she was raised, though it begins with the shock of how time accelerated once she emigrated westward. In Krakow, 'there were great careers to be made, no glamorous possibilities of upward mobility or the seductive temptations of acquiring nothing much to hurry towards.' Time was not money in Poland; in Canada and the United States, it was. Hoffman examines this philosophically fraught subject in unpretentious, clear chapters: asking how time affects our bodies, our minds, our cultures, and, finally, how time has accelerated and changed with the advent of the computer and the concept of 'immediacy'--or, as she puts it, 'what pace and density of stimulus we need in order to feel that something "interesting" is happening.' As a writer who is also an accomplished pianist, Hoffman is well qualified to analyze just what happens when time is unduly quickened (ADD-ridden children addicted to video games) or slowed down (the cultivated boredom of an Oblomov), and she ends her book with a description of contemporary whose 'techniques of reiterating with minute variations, short musical units, can be seen as both a way of slowing down time and of registering certain processes which may take place both in computers and in our bodies--the repetition, replication and recombina