Sublime

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally

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That is the predicate of the slender, poetic 1993 novel  Einstein's Dreams by physicist Alan Lightman — a book about time and the tricks we play on ourselves to bear our transience, a book that does for time what Alain de Botton’s  The Course of Love does for love: punctuating a fictional world with philosophical quickenings, th... See more

references to a “second” or “morning” sleep. The picture he began to piece together of human sleep before the industrial era was not one anyone had ever remarked on before. It appeared that people slept in two bouts: an evening bout, which lasted from about 9 p.m. to sometime after midnight, and a morning bout, which lasted from around 2 a.m. to da

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Anthropological studies of pre-industrial hunter-gatherers have also dispelled a popular myth about how humans should sleep.III Around the close of the early modern era (circa late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), historical texts suggest that Western Europeans would take two long bouts of sleep at night, separated by several hours of w

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"Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies: the slow sweep of stars across the night sky, the arc of the sun and variation in light, the waxing and waning of the moon, tides, seasons. Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of w... See more