Saving Time - Mille feuilles

Hardcover, 400 pages

English language

Published March 23, 2023 by Vintage.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-24270-4

(1 review)

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it--the way we experience time itself--and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.

In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, …

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it--the way we experience time itself--and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.

In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, "saving" time--recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature--could also mean that time saves us.

5 editions

4thace@books.theunseen.city 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.