Customer Reviews

A Sideways Look at Time

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I found this book on a lark, exploring the dreary and predictable college composition readers and handbooks presented on the temporary display tables and shelves of the College Composition and Communication Conference in Chicago this past March. My eye was caught not by the cover or the graphics, both of which seem unfortunately sophomoric--a parking meter, for goodness' sake--but by an epigraph by poet Gary Snyder that appears at the bottom of the cover: "An exercise indeed in Dharma, Poetry, and Philosophy."

Caught up in the no-time of academia and all of its poses and posturings, and rummaging through the publishers' offerings in a kind of post-modern numbness and frenetic despair to fill up the hour before we could herd ourselves to the next session, I picked up this book and started randomly reading. I was hooked immediately. The prose had integrity. Every spot I landed on seemed wet with thought. I DO need a book on time, I thought, and so I scarfed it up for $5 on the last day of the conference, when they strike the displays and the booksellers cast off their offerings so they can fly home unburdened by their wares.

The book has since not disappointed me.

I have taken my time (NPI) reading this. Author Jay Griffiths delights in her sideways thinking, pausing to think about time in deliciously new ways and imagining how we have imagined time in different eras, different historic moments, different cultures. Linear time boxes us in with some powerful assumptions and constructs that we are too often unaware of or resist considering. We need to consider time so as to understand what we are doing in time and what time is doing to us.

At times (NPI) this book seems an eclectic natural history, reminiscent of Annie Dillard or Diane Ackerman. Perhaps the witty hybrid of these writers. Griffiths is extraordinarily play in her carnival-like juggling of concepts and phrases and language. At times she ascends to hilarious spates of alliteration. At times she unravels a string of puns, mostly poking fun of patriarchal concepts and sacred Western ideologies. She's riding a jet ski through the history and philosophy of time, and most of the leaps and dives and cavortings are pregnant with thought, delightful, and at times deliriously funny.

This is an odd book, a wonderfully eclectic book, one to carry with you and read at odd pick-up times when you need a shot of fun and thought. At the airport. On the bus. While eating lunch.

This book, and Griffiths' musings, will reward you. You will find yourself reading passages out loud and marveling at her cleverness and her invitations to shift your awareness of what we too often take, well, for granted.

Jay Griffiths has definitely got a "sideways" take on time- for comparison, it touches lightly on Western culture's since of time- basically, time is money and on to native cultures who don't have much need for exact chronological time. In the Introduction that can be seen in the "Look Inside" feature here at amazon, Griffiths warns the prospective reader that this is a cultural trip through the concept of time and if one is more interested in the physics, chronological or Western concept of time, they might not be interested in this book. Either way, I think everybody would enjoy Griffiths' variations on time- how about "woman's time" for instance? No time to waste?- why not? It could be productive.

Over-all, "Sideways" is a totally different take on the conventional concept of time and is heavily influenced by native culture's since of time and space. A very eye-opening and engaging read.

I'll admit outright, i didn't get far into this book.

I'll add, though, that i very rarely give up on books. I read dozens, if not scores, of books per year, and have only ever quit about five partway through.

So how did this one get to be one of the lucky few? Not for my lack of interest in the subject matter, of that i can assure you. I'm fascinated by time. Does it even exist? Does the way we discuss it illuminate it or confuse it? Is it meaningful to refer to 'the past'? Does everyone experience it the same way? I have more questions than i could possibly hope to enumerate here, and A Sideways Look At Time promised me it would answer at least a few of them.

The first thirty pages, though, are excruciating. It's as if a college wanna-be spoken word artist directly transcribed an epic performance. Ideas flow and grammars are involute. Descriptions swamp meaning. Occasional insights (such as the overlap in words used to describe time and tides) are lost amidst the verbal drama. I could rarely read more than a paragraph without putting the book down to take a two day break to remember what English usually sounds like.

While i'd noticed that the author seemed to be calming down and resorting to a more normal mode of prose style as the book progressed, i just couldn't recover from the introductory pages.

I keep almost picking the book up again, almost re-starting it, because the promise of an investigation, a sideways look if you will, at time is so very tempting. I'm just afraid my brain will leak out my ears before he actually gets to any of the actual content.

This book represents the WORST kind of "mental masturbation"!

The author forces readers to endure ENDLESS, unbroken, unnavigable prose, which is occasionally interspersed with some (obviously) well researched factoids about how different cultures and different historical periods view the measurement of time and their relationship to it. Unfortunately, there is NOTHING to break up this relentless diatribe, save for an occasional quote: No subheads, no photos, no imagery at all -- just 360 pages of regurgitated research into time, separated only by 13 chapter titles!

Reading this book is worse than slogging through a text book. I suppose that readers should be grateful that the author saw fit to use appropriate paragraph breaks and a few quotes, or this book would be one LLLOOONNNNGGGG paragraph -- which is how it reads!!

Jay Griffiths may be our most important yet-to-be-discovered author. Her "Wild: An Elemental Journey" and "A Sideways Look at Time" are two of the seminal books of our time. Both books are profound commentaries on Western culture, and the boxed and bridled ways we live.

But there's way more here than just the message. The music of her writing is beguiling. Her exuberant word-play is to me the literary equivalent of jazz. She is like the Charlie Parker of the English language.

- Paul Winter

The book describes a historical and cultural account about the perception of time in different cultures. There are some interesting facts, but for the most part they were chosen and interpreted carefully and solely to support the author's view of the world. The main underlying message is that ancient peoples and primitive tribes are much more "organically" connected with time, that they are much more in touch with nature, and (by implication) more "wise" and "spiritual" than the "Western man" is today. Author uses (far too many) examples of the "ancient wisdom" of different obscure and remote tribes to demonstrate that the modern man is unable to connect to things that are truly meaningful, and thus lives life of empty consumerism. Also, there is a whole chapter about women being more in tune with "moon time" because of their monthly cycle; some of the women in my book group found this idea to be especially silly.

Author does not consider that many people live in big cities today because this is where the jobs are. Today, we need to use a watch, and show up for meetings on time. Not everybody has the luxury to live a life of quiet contemplation, surrounded by nature, without a need to show up on time for meetings or work.

This book reflects a self-absorbed, self-indulgent view of the world. There are some interesting facts and observations, but the book would greatly benefit from a more balanced approach. The editor clearly failed here: the book should have been better organized, and the redundancy eliminated. Often, one or two examples are enough: what type of a reader will need ten examples supporting a single concept or idea?

I encountered this wonderful book at my local library, and after breezing through it I just had to have a copy for my collection. It's safe to say it's poetic and compelling at the very least. I highly recommend it for anyone with who runs to a syncopated drum.

Namasté