A Sideways Look at Time

Rating:
Summary: A journalistic look at time
Review: A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT TIME is a gem of a book. Jay Griffiths combines the wisdom and humility of Ivan Illich, the anger at social injustice and word magic of Eduardo Galeano, the senstivity and compassion of Terry Tempest Williams and the sense of wonder of John Muir into a text that challenges the time and productivity obsessed world of consumer society. Take time to read this book; its depth, and Griffiths' erudition, sharp wit and incisive social critism can't be fully appreciated by skimming it. As the book makes clear, the road to (social and ecological) hell is paved with "time-saving" devices and the worldview that "time is money." Perhaps this book will eventually be seen as a manifesto for the growing "slow life movement" now taking root around the world. Even when I disagreed with Griffiths, which wasn't often, the power of her prose and her arguments forced me to think hard about my own views. You can't ask for more from a book.

Rating:
Summary: profound and powerful--don't miss it!
Review: A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT TIME is a gem of a book. Jay Griffiths combines the wisdom and humility of Ivan Illich, the anger at social injustice and word magic of Eduardo Galeano, the senstivity and compassion of Terry Tempest Williams and the sense of wonder of John Muir into a text that challenges the time and productivity obsessed world of consumer society. Take time to read this book; its depth, and Griffiths' erudition, sharp wit and incisive social critism can't be fully appreciated by skimming it. As the book makes clear, the road to (social and ecological) hell is paved with "time-saving" devices and the worldview that "time is money." Perhaps this book will eventually be seen as a manifesto for the growing "slow life movement" now taking root around the world. Even when I disagreed with Griffiths, which wasn't often, the power of her prose and her arguments forced me to think hard about my own views. You can't ask for more from a book.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully modern
Review: As with most things that we read, our reception to a work is governed in advance by the attitude we take toward it. If I pick up a novel by John Grisham I don't expect to find a long treatise about the philosophy of law; if I pick up Ronald Dworkin, I don't expect to be told a good story. Neither should I really expect Dworkin to be a storyteller; if I expect a good story from him, I don't really have the right to be disappointed when he doesn't deliver.

Griffths is not really a theorist or a philosopher: she's a writer. Granted, the distinction nowdays between philosophers and (literary) writers is blurred, but the point is that there's no reason to expect Griffths to give us something in the way of a well-reasoned and argued thesis. This is for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that "A Sideways Look at Time" is not meant to be an academic treatise. Sure it's got a bibliography and an index, which you wouldn't find in most novels, but to say that Griffths is arguing a 'thesis' is, I think, inaccurate. Sure she has a fundamental point she wants to get across, but it's nothing like a 'thesis' in any strict sense of the word. Griffths is more like a novelist, essayist, or critic.

On the other hand, Griffths' style is a direct result of her feminism, for which she has been criticized by many reviews on Amazon. Whatever one might think about feminism, as with anything else, a proper understanding of it would seem to be necessary before rejecting it out of hand.

As I granted before, Griffths is not a theorist. She seems to show no real or deep interest in feminist theory, particularly in such cases that are obviously related to her own viewpoint such as the 'women's time' of Julia Kristeva (who is not mentioned in Griffths' book), the 'wild zone' of Elaine Showalter, or, what is even closer to Griffths herself, the writings of Helene Cixous. Her bibliography lists some dubious sources, but Griffths' work has close affinities with many of these kinds of writers.

For one, feminist theory makes a very clear distinction between terms like "feminine", "female", "woman", and even "feminism" and "gynocentrism". Feminist theory (unless you're got severe pathological issues like Valerie Solanas) is not about 'male-bashing'. If people like Griffths are critical of "masculine logic" or "patriarchal systems", this has less to do with the physical domination of (biological) women by men than with a certain way of looking at various aspects of language, thought, and behavior. For better or worse, feminist theorists (at least a lot of them) are standing on the shoulders of the work done by Derrida whose critique of "logocentrism" has been appropriated by feminists as "phallologocentrism". This is, I think, a ridiculous word, but essentially the point is that the "patriarchal system" is less about physical or political domination by men (i.e., it's not just a matter of electing a woman president), but the way in which we use language and in the way we think. The rigorous logical form of academic essays, for example, where one's thoughts are controlled by being manipulated into a particular form (introduction, thesis statement, supporting paragraph #1, etc) is a "masculine" use of language. This is more obviously true of things like Aristotelian categorical logic or modern symbolic logic. "Masculine" language is a language of control and domination in the sense that "control" is a generally masculine trait. A "feminine" practice of writing (a la Cixous) is one that resists trying to 'control' language. "Feminine" writing is not necessarily about women, and neither is it necessarily about bashing men: it's about a certain way or style of writing. Read someone like Rachel Blau DuPlessis or perhaps Collette (or Griffths for that matter) and you'll see an example of a "feminine" style of writing. Now, most feminist theorists would probably say that Griffths is not the best feminine writer, but what I'm trying to get at is that her style is part of her point, and if you're going to praise her point while denigrating her style, it's not apparent to me that you really understood her point in the first place. The repetition, the lack of usual logical form, and so on, are deliberate attempts to let "language speak" instead of the author "speaking language".

(Incidentally, I should say that I've been describing SOME aspects of feminist theory. There are a lot of women writers and feminists who think this is all silly (Ruth Barcan Marcus, who basically invented modal logic, and Nussbaum come first to mind), but they have taken the time to take postmodern feminism seriously enough to have intelligent reasons for disliking it other than the fact it's "outmoded male-bashing".)

That being said, I don't want to make it sound as if I'm trying to say this is the greatest thing ever written. But I think Griffths effectively does what she set out to do: i.e., to make her readers re-think certain ideas and preconceptions about time that are essentially constraining for men and women alike, because time is not, really, a masculine or feminine matter but a quintessentially human one. A more philosophically fruitful way to think about Griffths and the formal aspects of her work (e.g., her style) in relation to her point about time is actually not so much as a feminist work, but rather as one that has interesting affinities to the philosopher Henri Bergson and his conceptions of mathematical and real time (duration or duree).

Rating:
Summary: It is not only time, you will find meaning to your existence
Review: At the first instance let me issue a warning : You are bound to get caught in the tornado : `A Sideways Look at Time'. Any page will get you hooked.

The new literary genre invented by Jay Griffiths is splendid, wide-ranging and illuminating. Shapeless concerns are articulated spontaneously and you will get fascinated with your new outlook in life. Sift through this compendious book for strands of gold.

The author may be self-indulgent but her arguments are irresistible and provocative.

Analyze and enjoy the following nuggets of wisdom from her book :

1) It is not that time passes, but ourselves. Time is always there... as long as there is life to use it.
2) Time has immediacy and radiance. It is a sensual perception and not a notation.
3) Time is not inert. We live with the past and present altogether. The past lives in the present spiritual values.
4) We live forwards but we understand backwards.
5) Have just a few hours everyday that are inviolate.
6) Children live in the heart of the ocean of time itself, in an everlasting Now. A child's eternal present is present-absorbed, present-spontaneous and present-elastic. Children have a dogged, delicious disrespect for punctuality.
7) Speed is deceptive and alluring, cruel, adrenaline-pounding and fascistic. Language too is driven faster and faster. Markets become super/hyper markets. Words are pressed from text to hypertext, not to supersede but to hypersede themselves.
8) In prostitution alone, the phrase `Time is money' is almost true.
9) The earth is sacred. It is not for violation, exploitation or negotiation. It is to be cared for, to be conserved.
10) With industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and biotechnology, time is reduced to a sequence of numbers without the vibrancy of natural seasons. Divorcing time and nature makes an artifice of Time and artifact of Nature.
11) Particularity is lost on the Information Super Highway. Being a virtual everywhere is an actual nowhere. It is a Teflon place, wiped clean of muddy, earthly reality. Every act in virtual time is final, finite and finished. No human act is.
12) Computinglish, the type of language dominant today -overweighing command structures and undervaluing language's playful, seductive and gainsaying subtleties, its ambiguities and nuances, disagreements and disobediences.
13) The word `Will' is not innocent. What will be is not in the lap of some-God-of-the-future, but is an act of will, an act of power, the will of today. When the will is infinite in its grasp, the only possible result is tragedy. Will must be tempered with respect. This will could be a present, an act of care and generosity.
14) In this age of `rights', there should surely be Time Rights, fighting any attempts at the metaphysical enslavery of people's time, arguing for a humane clock, for an integrity of time and respect for the dignity of the individual's hours.
15) Trees do not just last passively over time, they create time by creating breathable air. They are oxygenating lungs of the Earth, vital to the ecosystem and home to millions of species. Time is different in a treescape.
16) India has its `vessel above time', always full to overflowing, a notion of eternity transcending any temporality.
17) The mythic moment is where the profane present meets a sacred eternity.

Delve deeply into the following chunks of messages which embrace Dharma, Poetry and Philosophy.

TIME

This fantastic book is a broadside against all the misuses of time. It is a manifesto for time to be seen extraordinary, strange, and sensual. Scientists today use femtoseconds, a millionth of a billionth of second. Time has been increasingly divided and subdivided. Everything is timed. Quality time is quantitative, counted and accounted. The fullness of time is over emptied of its grace and generosity. In femtoseconds and cesium atoms, modernity's time is divided but not distinguished.

Chronos and Kairos were different Gods for time's different aspects. Chronos was the God of absolute time, linear, chronological and quantifiable. Kairos was the god of timing, of opportunity, of choice and mischance, the auspicious and the not-so-auspicious. If you sleep because the clock tells you it is way past your bed time, it is chronological time. If you sleep because you are tired, that is kairological time. Kairological time is the spirit of the particular moment. It is a concept, time enlivened and various, time elastic and fertile.


WOMEN

If man has seven ages, women in contemporary Western society has only one. One young one. One fixed one. Time must be stayed, for women, like plastic - with plastic. HRT, cosmetic industry, and the cosmetic surgery all help towards this goal.

Female faces are plasticized into facile facsimile face-lifts. The face's whole meaning is a page to write your character on; the whole purpose of having a face is to show emotion in motion - the mobility at the heart of expressiveness. Obstetricians speed up labor with vacuum extraction or caesarian section. In its wise etymology, what does obstetrics mean? `To be present', to `stand at'. Not to speed up labor but to be present at it. Not to force a woman but to stand by her.

PROGRESS

Progress is only an idea, a mental construct, but it is treated as if it had the status of concrete fact, as if the march of progress had a sort of absolute inevitability and preordained certainty. Progressing into the future appeals because it claims an optimistic mobility while the whole idea of sustainability can be characterized as stasis.

Progress is a specific idea; western, money-oriented, and technologically biased. But it pretends to a universality, so that all peoples must be made to define and embrace progress in exactly the same way. Progress is two-faced; it has a lovely smile for the powerful and a cruel sneer for the poor and underprivileged.

Jay's holistic view of time resolves the modern dilemma - a meaningless existence and the Subtle Trap of Counterfeit Meaning. The Search For Meaning is vital precisely because without it, you fall prey to the lure of "counterfeit" meanings. If you make no effort to discover the meaning of your individual life, you thereby play host to an existential vacuum at the very core of your being. Thank the author Jay Griffiths and read her magnum opus with wonder and reverence. You will find the real meaning of your life. You can hear the language speaks instead of the author.


Rating:
Summary: Common Sense Concepts Mixed with Man-bashing
Review: Give Jay Griffiths credit for an apt title. This is indeed a sideways look: the book does not present an intelligent investigation into the history and philosophy of the concept of time. Instead, Griffiths offers up a series of petulant and (affectedly) whimsical observations about social variations in the interpretation of time. If it is news to you that modern society moves at an ever-increasing pace, or that children sense time differently, or that things seem slower in the countryside, you may learn from this book.

Even then, however, you must endure the real topic of Ms. Griffiths' study, which might be summarized as, "The Evils of Western Patriarchal Society." It is not enough for Griffiths to observe that our culture has an unfortunate obsession with time's pace, and that there is a romantic appeal to the third-world cultures which move by natural rhythms. Rather, in a tired rehashing of late-80's Marxist-Feminism, she asserts that time has been co-opted and ruined by Western males. It's all about power, you see: one gets the idea that Griffiths envisions weekly, punctually-scheduled, secret meetings in which men plot the subversion of world culture through the mass-production of digital watches. And don't get her started on the terrors induced by Christianity "in the struggle for world domination." While Christians recognize Christ as the ultimate conqueror of time and the salvation from all the temporal ills which the book lists, Griffiths portrays the "power-hungry Church" as another source of evil, creating mental shackles with horrific concepts such as Calendars and B.C./A.D! By contrast, Griffiths celebrates any alternatives to Western traditions, including Druidism and tribes such as "the Kalui people of Papua New Guinea," who "have a clock of birds."

Griffiths rails against Franklin's aphorism that "Time is money," but no one can deny that money is money, and you'll waste both if you spend them on this book.

Rating:
Summary: Good thesis, terrible execution, annoying style
Review: I picked up this book while browsing at a large bookstore, which shall remain nameless. I wish I had come to Amazon first to read the reviews, because after reading it, I feel I wasted my $14.

The thesis is great: that time is not the neutral, uniform, and universal background feature of our lives that we assume it to be. It is not just the steady flow of life ticking away in the background of all that we do; it is a highly socio-historically and politically-defined phenomenon that need not be what it currently is. There are many ways of measuring and experiencing time. The one we use, agreed upon right around the 1st World War (maybe even a part of that war), is only one such conception of time, and an inadequate one at that. It is tied to the linear, mechanistic thinking of classical continental philosophies, and of the early, mechanistic, reductionistic versions of science that gave birth to capitalism, technology, and medicine as we know them. Other ways of measuring time are more feeling-based and less rationalistic. Native peoples all over the world feel time in a less linear, more cyclic, more seasonal, and more situated way. This book shows these ways of experiencing time have been systematically undermined, and even purposefully destroyed by those with religious, political, and power-mongering motives threatened by these native views of the passage of time.

That is the book in a nutshell. That is to say, there is literally no reason to read this book if you understand that thesis and the ideas that follow from that. The presentation of the information is like a shotgun blast of barely connected factoids. The chapters seem to have no flow or organization. It is as if the author attempts to download everything she has ever learned in one sitting into one book...it does not work. I would imagine some would say it was written like this on purpose, in order to undermine the masculinized logical, mechanistic, "tick-tick" flow of most such books. But to be honest, there is nothing masculinized about a little organization, and certainly nothing masculine about flow, that most feminine of concepts, so I don't think that such an argument would hold water. Maybe it is just a failed literary experiment, but I cannot figure out why such a great idea was so poorly executed, nor do I understand how it was published in this form.

I give it 3 stars merely because I think there is an important idea in this work, and I learned a thing or two, but the disjointed writing style kills this work (it is, as an earlier reviewer pointed out, pompous, self-important, adolescent, and just plain annoying). Hopefully someone will pick up these ideas and find a better, more interesting way of presenting them.

Rating:
Summary: Smug and self-congratulatory
Review: The premise for this book had so much potential--examining cultural differences regarding time--but the execution was horrendous. The wholescale condemnation of all things "Western," "phallic," "linear" and "masculine," and the unilateral and uncritical praise for "indigenous" cultures reminded me of a freshman in their first college seminar: juvenile, naive, and accusatory. She praises what she terms the feminine and damns anything masculine. I found this reductive and insulting. I am an avowed feminist, but I believe this kind of devisive thinking to be harmful and destructive.

Furthermore, Griffiths is an awful writer. She is cutesy, smug, self-congratulatory, and badly organized. Her one thesis seems to be "clock time, bad!" and never moves much beyond that. There are many other authors, such as Linda Hogan, who can write poetically and also politically, but Jay Griffiths is not one of them.

Avoid this self-important book and its hypocritical, accusatory author. Direct your precious time elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've read!
Review: This is truly one of the most thought-provoking and well-crafted books I've read-but be warned, it's not for the closed-minded reader who is simply interested in defending the oppressive nature of dominant Western culture and "time" while denying that, yes, there may be a more responsible, healthy, just, and environmentally and culturally responsible way to understand and live in our world. Instead, it is for those who can accept and, indeed, embrace that one can learn thruths from nature and from those who continue to live so closely to and within its rhythms. It is for those who are interested in learning about how we got to this "Teflon society"-and how age, wisdom, and process have somehow been quashed by immaturity, short-sightedness, and haste. I've recommended it to my husband, family members, and friends. Ms. Griffith's writing style is witty, poetic, and provocative. She makes my "if I could invite anyone to a dinner party, I would invite..." list! Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: A journalistic look at time
Review: This was not the book I had hoped it would be. It is a good one, but given its title, its chosen subject, it could have reasonably been a terrific one. Griffiths, perhaps, is too young and extroverted to have selected the more exotic and decisive aspects her subject and spent some, er...time with them. Perhaps it is a matter of temperament. Rather than merely outline the manifold ways with which time is conceived in various cultures, she could have inhabited some of the more interesting constructs and helped the reader try them out, experience them. They are here, in this book--the accounts of peoples for whom past and future are identical, others for whom time is exclusively cyclical, or for whom change itself (as in "progress") is a negative, rather than a positve value--but the author doesn't tarry long enough to immerse us in these non-Western mind sets, help us to see the cosmos through their eyes.

Griffiths is basically a journalist of the chatty, wide-ranging sort hat the British are good at (as with the author of "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" or the old BBC series "Connections"). Her methods suggest she had located some gigantic encyclopedia, looked up "time," then followed up all the leads and connections, however tenuous, however founded on mere figures of speech. The resulting verbal carnival hops through all periods and continents, back and forth, sometimes repetitively, flogging her biases (Western, male, linear time is Bad; non- or pre-industrial, female, i.e., cyclic, time is Good) ad infinitum and ad nauseum. Hard to imagine a reader of any stripe not wanting to rise to the defense of our own clock-dominated culture, if only to be contrary.

If you dislike puns, stop reading this immediately and look for another book. Griffiths is positively smitten with them, and moreover with wordplay of all kinds. The trouble with this penchant is that it too often competes with her very interesting subject, her considerable research into non-Western peoples and their customs. The book is self-indulgent in the extreme. With all the multiple re-phrasings and digressions, I suspected more than once that the author is used to being paid by the word.

With all these caveats, though, this is a rich survey of a fascinating subject by an erudite author. She tosses off scores of razor-sharp insights without seeming to value them, often crowding them with silliness and pointless asides that dilute her purposes. Those willing to sift through this compendious book for the strands of gold, however, will find it quite worthwhile.