Our time-poor lives, lived against a ticking clock

The first story I was told about time, when I was about six years old, came from the Mahabharata. Time, according to the great Sanskrit epic, was immense, a wheel that rotated through cycles of creation (sarga) and destruction (pralaya), the birth and death of entire ages and worlds measured in aeons.

As a child — when an afternoon could contain an immensity of exploration — time certainly felt infinite. Yet, after just a few years in the workplace, I had adapted to the adult world, where time is scarce, measured in unforgiving hours and minutes. To be grown-up is to race against the clock, to believe that you are in danger of either wasting or running out of time.

Bookstores today are piled high with titles on productivity and time management — but two recent works of non-fiction approach this enormous subject in a more thoughtful way. Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time by Rebecca Struthers, a Birmingham-based watchmaker, offers a history of timekeeping alongside a meditation on the value of our hours and days.

Meanwhile, in Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, California-based artist and academic Jenny Odell sets out to find a concept of time that isn’t limiting or distressing — “something other than time as money, climate dread or fear of dying”.

Time is something we have or don’t have, save or lose . . . It is the backdrop for our place in a mechanised world

Struthers takes her readers on a engrossing tour of timekeeping across the centuries — from the Babylonian calendar to the invention of sundials, ancient water clocks and candle clocks that capture some of the modern sense of the hours burning away, to the first clock towers, which were developed during the 12th and 13th centuries.

But it was during the Industrial Revolution, she writes, that time started to replace tasks as a measure of one’s worth. As the British social historian EP Thompson once noted, as early as 1700 “the familiar landscape of disciplined industrial capitalism, with the time sheet, the timekeeper, the informers and the fines” had swung into action.

Struthers belongs to a rare profession, but her work has allowed her to be “an artist, designer, engineer and physicist” rolled into one, and she offers a key insight: “In western capitalist cultures, time is something we have, or don’t have, save or lose, it marches on, it drags, seems to stand still and flies. Time thrums constantly underneath everything we do. It is the backdrop and the context for our existence and our place in what is now a supremely mechanised world.”

Odell’s 2019 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, became a surprise bestseller, and her new book Saving Time builds on many of those concerns about the frantic demands of modern life.

“I doubt burnout has ever been solely about not having enough hours in the day,” Odell writes. “What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning and purpose.” As she explores the history of capitalism and labour, the phrase “time is money” takes on a far grimmer meaning; the history of selling time is, she writes, “specific and violent” — the first time sheets (as we would now call them) tracking labour were used on plantations.

In her workshop, Rebecca and her husband Craig Struthers (his illustrations are part of the marvellous appeal of Hands of Time) work through the day on tiny mechanical parts; “a watchmaker’s world is often not much bigger than a thumbnail” but it is “all-consuming”.

If orreries — those gorgeous clockwork models of the solar system that became popular in the 18th century — are “our very human way of containing the universe”, wristwatches, which were developed in the early 19th century, also mark a turning point for humanity, she writes. “By capturing cosmic events in a device that we can put on our wrist or hold in our hand, we are reassuring ourselves — perhaps misguidedly — that we can control the uncontrollable.”

Many of the great histories of time, including Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time and the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s 2017 The Order of Time offer dazzling, cosmic perspectives. But both Odell and Struthers pose a striking set of questions about how humans today experience time, and whether that relationship could — and should — change.

If Odell points to the coronavirus pandemic as a turning point, a moment when the slow, fluid pauses of pandemic time made us doubt the tyranny of the clock, Struthers, for all her love of watches, reminds us that time for our ancestors “was divided not by abstract numbers, but by natural ‘events’, such as seasons and their related weather conditions.”

It is no coincidence that these books, which invite us to admire the centuries of skill that have gone into timekeeping devices, and also to free ourselves of clockwatching, are written by an artist and a watchmaker — two professions that encourage practitioners to concentrate fully on the present moment. Struthers and Odell have, through their books, restored my childhood sense that time is ample, that the centuries stretching beyond our lifetimes are reassuringly vast.

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café