Sublime
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The greed for speed embodied in the factory clock signalled the triumph of linear time. Now it was the artificial construct of minutes and seconds that mattered rather than the natural cycles of the moon or seasons. The long-term future began to fade away as the present loomed ever larger.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
For much of history, night was simply terrifying. Roger Ekirch begins his fascinating history of nighttime by saying, “It would be difficult to exaggerate the suspicion and insecurity bred by darkness.”3 In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke said there was no other “idea so universally terrible in all times, and in all countries, as darkness.”
Tish Harrison Warren • Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
Critics and readers tend to be insufferable nostalgics. In a letter he sent from exile in 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli described his evening routine: After coming home from the “vulgarity” and “trifles” of daily life, he donned “garments regal and courtly” to commune with the dead. Reading those before him, he was “not frightened by death,” and instea
... See moreA 24/7 world produces an apparent equivalence between what is immediately available, accessible, or utilizable and what exists.
Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
In 1982 Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term “time-sickness” to describe the obsessive belief that “time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up.”
Carl Honore • In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
David Wengrow • An archeological revolution transforms our image of human freedoms | Aeon Essays
Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira,
David Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Formerly all time was local: when the sun was highest, that was noon. Only a visionary (or an astronomer) would know that people in a different place lived by a different clock. Now time could be either local or standard, and the distinction baffled most people. The railroads required standard time, and the telegraph made it feasible.