4thace reviewed Saving Time by Jenny Odell
Nature and life and community all have something to say about how time works
4 stars
This author writes books a little way between personal essay and nonfiction exploration of a topic. I read her book How To Do Nothing in 2020 not long after it came out. She refers to what it was like to have that book come out in this new book and how the emerging Covid-19 pandemic then affected the way she was thinking. This book is about her conception of time as a technical and scientific term, about social and cultural takes on it, about ways it is expressed in art, about the struggle between management and labor over it as a workplace resource, and about a measure of change in the natural world. Philosophically it can be taken to be either an almost tangible and uniform object to be measured precisely or as one tied to the passage of events in whatever fashion they take place. The first of these …
This author writes books a little way between personal essay and nonfiction exploration of a topic. I read her book How To Do Nothing in 2020 not long after it came out. She refers to what it was like to have that book come out in this new book and how the emerging Covid-19 pandemic then affected the way she was thinking. This book is about her conception of time as a technical and scientific term, about social and cultural takes on it, about ways it is expressed in art, about the struggle between management and labor over it as a workplace resource, and about a measure of change in the natural world. Philosophically it can be taken to be either an almost tangible and uniform object to be measured precisely or as one tied to the passage of events in whatever fashion they take place. The first of these makes it seem more like a resource for people to hoard, the second depicts it as too fluid to be manipulated that way. There are biological organisms known now to be colonial collections of individuals which are thought to have a joint lifespan of thousands of years, far longer than that of any of its parts. To what degree does the human community bear resemblance to this? Just as Covid-19 alterered people's perception of how to go about their lives, it changed the experience of time for millions. The stress and uncertainty increased the sense of urgency, and the fragility it exposed encouraged many to shed once important activities, such as work, in favor of higher goals.
For much of this book, the author rambles among different locations around the San Francisco Bay Area which manifest some salience to the theme. She ruminates on what the various impressions that came to her had to say about time. For some readers this might seem more or less incoherent, but I felt like the vivid descriptions of how some ordinary process illuminates the workings of time were pretty perceptive, and laid out in a nice conversational manner.
