A Sideways Look at Time

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

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.

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)

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.

A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT TIME is a gem of a book. Jay Griffiths combines the wisdom and humility of Ivan Illich, the anger at social injustice and word magic of Eduardo Galeano, the senstivity and compassion of Terry Tempest Williams and the sense of wonder of John Muir into a text that challenges the time and productivity obsessed world of consumer society. Take time to read this book; its depth, and Griffiths' erudition, sharp wit and incisive social critism can't be fully appreciated by skimming it. As the book makes clear, the road to (social and ecological) hell is paved with "time-saving" devices and the worldview that "time is money." Perhaps this book will eventually be seen as a manifesto for the growing "slow life movement" now taking root around the world. Even when I disagreed with Griffiths, which wasn't often, the power of her prose and her arguments forced me to think hard about my own views. You can't ask for more from a book.