What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World

Physicist Carlo Rovelli writes that the nature of time is so hard to characterize that it’s more accurate to call it an event rather than a structure, “more like a kiss than a stone.” All physicists will tell you the same: that time is a slippery thing appearing every day in the guise of the exacting clock, unable to yield its measures for us, “wai

the clock measures productivity for everyone now, in a manner so internalized it feels all but natural to our bodies.

It’s only now that I can see the dissonance that was the most painful: to Brian and me and our close circle, he was still the much-wanted individual person he’d been since arrival. But to nearly everyone else, he became the diagnosis—forever described and understood and interpreted primarily by genetic status.

Each of us has to decide, insofar as we can, whether to let the economic clock dictate our minutes and hours, and how we’ll know if we measure up.

Assistance, dependence, vulnerability: these embodied experiences have the dignity of the truly human about them. They create networks of caregiving that sustain us all.

But outsourcing authority to the mechanical clock has severed time from all connection to the body or the season by breaking life into a series of discrete units—the effect of which, writes Mumford, “helped [to] create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”

Lewis Mumford, in his classic history of technology, Technics and Civilization, reminds us of the social and emotional work of this early clock, keeping a desirable life set apart by spiritual habits that were measured by marking the hours. “Within the walls of the monastery was sanctuary,” he writes. “Under the rule of order surprise and doubt and

Never mind the noise of popular culture, with its stories of personal “victory” over disability, all the spotlight on individuals who bravely go on “despite” their body’s shortcomings. Crip time is something else entirely. It suggests that the clock may be every bit as much the culprit in the mismatch between a life like Graham’s and the world, not

How much do we organize around our academic or professional training, versus our social and behavioral growth and our wider connections to our communities?