Time and the Art of Living

I recommend that everyone read this fine collection of meditations on the practical use of time in daily living. A pleasurable read.

This book reminds me of ancient moral philosophy. It's intelligent thinking about life, with a practical emphasis: how to enjoy your life and live well. It's quite thoughtful and original, yet not systematic at all, usually overconfident (kind of forcedly profound), and occasionally even ridiculous. But always relevant and stimulating. It's more thinking about time, or our experience of time, than you'd think is possible, unless you'd bothered to fight through Heidegger. The value of the book is its creative thought about life. This book will make you think about your life. If you're thoughtful, you'll disagree with some of the author's opinions, but there's some gold in here. I give it five stars for stimulating valuable thoughts, five stars for content (despite some flaws), and five stars for the genre: we need more intelligent, thoughtful books about living well.

Robert Grudin's "Time and the Art of Living" is about how we exist in time, and the role time plays in our lives, for better if we make productive use of it, or for worse if we ignore it. Not a self-help book, it is nonetheless a book that I come back to every several years, both for its accessible erudition and for its suggestions for giving shape to your life in time. Highly recommended.

I would like to take a slightly different tact in reviewing this title, and that is to describe the pertinent circumstances in which I re-read it. I came back to Grudin's beautiful little volume after finally making my way through Heidegger's "Being and Time". I struggled through the weightier tome, and believe that I mined several nuggets of wisdom from it, although I think for the most part the battle was not always worth the rewards. I may be an immature reader of Heidegger, but it's hard to justify the complete murder of prose and order even in the attempt to establish new (or perhaps just unpopular) views. Heidegger's ideas on space and time however whetted my appetite for further explorations (especially since he seemed to leave so many paths untread). "Time and the Art of Living" is not a dense philosophical treatise, but it manages to be profound for both it's poetic style, and refreshing observations. Where Being and Time remains unsatisfying in clarity for the philosopher, and partial and vague for the existential thinker, Time and Art is direct and compelling enough to change a life. It's mission is not the same, but it is all the more succesful for realizing what needs to be said about the time in our lives. Grudin celebrates clear goals and vision as our anchor in the time of the present. Such clarity and humanism when contrasted with many other explorations shines forth brightly.

360 very brief interconnected observations about aspects of how humans experience, distort, learn from, and ignore the flow of time. Rich in science, philosophy, and ideas that can be helpful in your life and your thinking. Deft and accessible, to be meditated upon or dipped into at random