Customer Reviews

World Enough & Time, On Creativity and Slowing Down

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This book arrived two days ago. I started to read it and I'm already at page 210. I know I'll continue reading it until deep in the night, once I have had a chance to do my evening hike with my dogs. I want to gobble it up. I realize this is high paced! I love it. I find I can savor it, even if I go fast. I feel very familiar with what CM writes, yet at the same time, so much of what she has to say is new. Delicious!

CM reminds me of the many ways I can be connected with my soul. She blends the personal and the scholarly in a way that the reader feels cared for. I highly recommend her wisdom. World Enough and Time is a great springboard for discussion as well.

Christian McEwen leads us gently but inexorably toward what we all yearn for--the time and space to simply be. We all have a deep hunger for slowfulness and tranquillity but rarely manage to experience it. She has been enjoying "herself" in this way since childhood and now encourages us to do the same by appreciating our lives in each and every moment. She turns on its head the adage that "it is better to travel hopefully than arrive." Let us share this exquisitely written book with as many people as possible before they all die of exhaustion.

It is a familiar observation that our lives flash by with too little time to savor the gifts of the present moment. Even having read a few books on Buddhism and mindfulness, I was constantly surprised and delighted by "World Enough and Time." It is, if you like, a glowing embroidery stitched around the notion that daydreaming, taking your time, doing things slowly, detaching yourself from the screen, the telephone--taking time for face to face meetings, writing real letters, looking at a painting or a landscape--are essential not only to our creativity but to our very wholeness. Finding inspiration in literature and a wide range of other disciplines, Christian McEwen wears her erudition lightly. Her writing voice is supple and strong as she follows her truths to their innermost parts. She has given me a whole list of other authors I now want to read; and a book that will stay by my bed for a long time to come. This book is a classic of its kind and everyone should read it.

I love this book. It is filled with good sense and rich with the musings of a very wonderful mind. I read pieces of it every morning as a way to get centered in what matters, beyond what passes for connection in today's noisy world. I was prepared to like the book but I was not prepared to have it become a part of my life. A beautiful accomplishment. Time very well spent.

Fall Back. Today we moved the clocks back by an hour and received the gift of an extra hour. And didn't it feel good? I love that stolen hour. Well, that's what you will feel when you read Christian McEwen's beautifully written new book - like you've been given a very special gift of time - enough time to do, enough time to be. I have read it several times (first in a big gulp and then quite slowly, savoring each chapter)and have talked about it so much that I end up giving my copy away. So I keep buying more copies to give to friends and family. In fact, I have discovered the perfect birthday, Christmas and graduation gift. People love it! This special book is packed with wisdom and intelligence as well as powerful prose that will make your heart sing. I feel like she wrote this book just for me: a New Yorker trying to recover from 'hurry sickness' who hides in doing and busyness. This book is delicious read. It is a healing journey and a recipe for creativity. If you've read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, you will love this book. It will resonate with you if you like the creative side of yourself, the one who takes photographs or writes poems or bakes pies from scratch. If you read Matthieu Ricard's Happiness, you will love the practical ideas that McEwen includes at the end of each chapter. Or if you were attracted to Gretchen Ruben's The Happiness Project, you will really adore McEwen's elegant prose that packs in several university classes worth of insight in gentle ways that feels like poetry. Guess you can tell, I love this book. More importantly, I think we need this book.

I have savored this beautiful book in morning doses since Christmas. Today I reached the last page and knew that I would "turn around" and begin again, simply for the pleasure of remaining in Christian McEwen's warm, literate, witty, kind-hearted company. Encountering her particular mind reminds me of my first "meetings" with other essayists who have come to mean so much to me - JB Priestley, Robertson Davies, EB White, and especially Anne Fadiman.

Christian is that amazing friend who introduces you to a brighter, more colorful, and altogether more vibrant and loving world. She shares her "circle" of friends and influences generously and with the simple desire to pass along what is good or helpful. Here, you'll meet not only great writers, but walkers, artists, poets, children, philosophers, and epicureans of slowing down.

Christian's "voice" is by turns friendly, elegant, scholarly, inquiring, mournful, and joyful. I love the breadth of experience and feeling in every chapter - a breadth which calls something similar out of me as I read. Best of all, she not only tells us that slowing down is possible and will bless our lives in many ways, but she models on the page exactly how it can be done through well-chosen and interesting stories and examples. In the end, I concluded that the very act of reading her book was a health-giving and joy-giving form of slowing down!

I recommend this book with my whole heart and mind to anyone who loves great writing, graceful living, and wonderful company.

I made my way through this book slowly, often rereading as I went. It called forth deep, significant dreams and occasional bouts of euphoria comparable to what I often feel after days of silent retreat. I've been doing one or another form of Buddhist practice since 1986, so much of what McKewen writes about the importance of "empty" time is familiar to me. But it's the way she puts it together with art-making and the remarkable testimony from so many writers and artists that is so moving and revelatory. Also I don't think I've ever seen anyone so accurately capture the beauty and bliss of the creative process. Apart from all that the writing is gorgeous. World Enough & Time has reconfigured me, I suspect in ways I'm not even aware, and it will surely do so to you as well.