Saving Time, by Jenny Odell (Random House, 364 pages)
The quote that opens Jenny Odell’s Saving Time is from the late painter Agnes Martin: “I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore.”
For anyone who feels that way (and doesn’t everyone feel that way?) Odell proposes to teach us how to discover a life “beyond the clock” — to imagine “a life of identity and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.” To do so will take up a rather large chunk of your time, which is exquisitely ironic, but Odell showed in her first book, 2019’s How to Do Nothing, that she has a penchant for pithy titles that have little to do with the actual books.
Saving Time offers what Odell calls “conceptual tools” for thinking about time, not time-saving strategies. It is what is commonly called a deep dive into the theme, with Odell leisurely rambling through every rabbit hole to which her observations lead. This is not usually a bad thing, except for the fact that people attracted to a book called Saving Time are likely to be, well, in a hurry for its points to be made. And Odell will not be hurried; she writes with the indolence of someone sprawled in a hammock on a summer day.
Which is kind of her point. Her thesis is this: Our contemporary notion of time is closely (and somewhat bizarrely) tied to work and wages, even while much that surrounds us on the planet unfolds on geologic time. This is not good. Odell rues the state of the modern worker (of which the famously tracked Amazon employee is perhaps the most pitiable example) while tracing the origins of the clock-driven world. Capitalism is an unnamed villain here, even though she points out that until industrialization, human beings stood in for machines, per the slaves of ancient Rome and Egypt.
And for all the blame that has been heaped upon Jeff Bezos, it’s interesting to learn that even the “father of our country,” George Washington, had Bezos-like standards at Mount Vernon, writing to an overseer at one point that slaves should do “as much in 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health, or constitution will allow of.” That and the Amazon mindset were brilliantly and presciently mocked in a 1936 Charlie Chaplin film called Modern Times, in which a company tries to get more out of its workers by using a machine to quickly feed them their lunch. “The Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work. Don’t stop for lunch! Be ahead of your competitor.”
Of course, the need to get more out of workers wasn’t limited to men. Odell writes, “It is telling, for example, that the owners of the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, tried to argue that longer hours were actually good for the women. Without the ‘wholesome discipline of factory life,’ the women would be left to their own dangerous whims, ‘without a warrant that this time will be well employed.’”
Odell invites us to consider what our employers are buying with the wages they pay us: a specific service or good, or our time? If the latter, what are the boundaries? And in a society in which “discretionary time” is vastly different and often varies by class, what, if anything, do we owe those most deficient in time, which amounts to life itself.
Interestingly, the time problem seems, in many ways, a cruel gift of technology, which expanded the ways in which we can be tethered to a clock. Odell notes the work of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who writes of “a hypothetical character named Linda, an overwhelmed professor who rushes through her day, never having enough time to fulfill all her obligations to students, co-workers, family, and friends; expected to be always available, answerable to everyone; with the feeling that she’s always falling short and running behind.”
Linda, Odell writes, “does not have access to Feierabend, the feeling of leisure that peasants and farmers might have had when the cattle and children were in for the night” — the pleasant sense that work is, at least for a couple of hours, concluded. Nor does anyone with a cell phone perpetually turned on, and thus reachable by anyone all the time. (Some countries are trying to address this with legislation colloquially known as “the right to disconnect.”)
Seeing the struggles of their parents and grandparents, younger people are resisting their path, choosing to be less ambitious, more protective of their time. There are costs, not only in material goods but in the respect of their elders. For example, the young Chinese factory worker who in 2016 quit his job in order to take a lengthy bike trip — “I have been chilling,” he wrote — started a movement called “lying flat,” but those who participated were widely decried as lazy and shameful. Lie flat if you want, the message is, but don’t talk about it in public.
Time moves differently for people in different circumstances; for prisoners incarcerated for life, of course, time is a construct almost incomprehensible to those who have relative freedom. And the disabled and those who work with them have their own concept of time called “crip time,” which acknowledges, among other things, the extended amount of time it takes to do things relative to the non-disabled population.
Odell wrote this book, or at least some of it, from the privileged position of an artist’s residency in the Puget Sound, which gifted her the opportunity to muse about time in the slow-drip fashion of geologic time. As such, Saving Time often seems something like elitist navel-gazing. Additionally, there are many smart and insightful thinkers whom, for whatever reason, it is a struggle to pay attention to, and Odell is among their class. The topic is important; she makes that much clear. But Saving Time is not a book I would recommend. C
