A Sideways Look at Time

Average customer rating:

Good in spots, ineffectual usually, bad in places

Opening Up Time

Not worth the "time" to read it.

A sideways look at...nothing

It is not only time, you will find meaning to your existence

A Sideways Look at Time
Jay Griffiths
Manufacturer: Tarcher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1585423068
Release Date: 2004-03-08

Book Description

A brilliant and poetic exploration of the way that we experience time in our everyday lives.

Why does time seem so short? How does women's time differ from men's? Why does time seem to move slowly in the countryside and quickly in cities? How do different cultures around the world see time? In A Sideways Look at Time, Jay Griffiths takes readers on an extraordinary tour of time as we have never seen it before.

With this dazzling and defiant work, Griffiths introduces us to dimensions of time that are largely forgotten in our modern lives. She presents an infectious argument for other, more magical times, the diverse cycles of nature, of folktale or carnival, when time is unlimited and on our side. This is a book for those who suspect that there's more to time than clocks.

Irresistible and provocative, A Sideways Look at Time could change the way we view time-forever.

Customer Reviews:

Good in spots, ineffectual usually, bad in places.......2006-07-02

Jay Griffiths does some good work in places pointing out some less obvious results of and evidence for the quickening/ cheapening of our culture, but her text is fairly rambling (sometimes in a good way, but generally not, with points being made over and over with little further elucidation) and there's irrational male-bashing pretty frequently. The book is mostly a catalog of the differences in concepts of time, ownership, history, etc. between western and non-western cultures, and it gets stretched thin in most places.
My main objection, however, is her constant science-bashing. After the first few chapters, you'd think that Newton was responsible for all of the suffering and exploitation in the world; she demonizes the process and results of science, calling atomic clocks and the like "silly" - but I'm sure that she wouldn't turn up her nose at a GPS receiver or computer! It's obvious that she doesn't understand science at all, but instead takes an outsider's critique of concepts and processes that she has only the vaguest conception of. (OK, one example: she quotes the 'ridiculous' speed of computers as being some high number of "gigaflops per second." 7 gigaflops is 7 billion floating point operations per second [FLoating point OPerations per Second], so gigaflops per second is a ridiculous and nonsensical unit.)

Opening Up Time.......2006-06-04

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.

Not worth the "time" to read it........2006-02-23

The author clearly has a problem with men. Most of the book reads like a collection of the author's opinions and rants. The arguments are circular and redundant. I stopped a little over halfway through the book because I was weary from reading the same statements over and over.

A sideways look at...nothing.......2005-05-27

One of the worst books I have ever seen on the topic of time. Awful editing, annoying style, lack of substance, factual errors, total lack of cohesiveness. Avoid!

It is not only time, you will find meaning to your existence.......2005-02-16

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) Trees do not just last passively over time, they create time by creating breathable air. They are oxygenating lungs of the Earth, vital to the ecosystem and home to millions of species. Time is different in a treescape.
16) India has its `vessel above time', always full to overflowing, a notion of eternity transcending any temporality.
17) The mythic moment is where the profane present meets a sacred eternity.

Delve deeply into the following chunks of messages which embrace Dharma, Poetry and Philosophy.

TIME

This fantastic book is a broadside against all the misuses of time. It is a manifesto for time to be seen extraordinary, strange, and sensual. Scientists today use femtoseconds, a millionth of a billionth of second. Time has been increasingly divided and subdivided. Everything is timed. Quality time is quantitative, counted and accounted. The fullness of time is over emptied of its grace and generosity. In femtoseconds and cesium atoms, modernity's time is divided but not distinguished.

Chronos and Kairos were different Gods for time's different aspects. Chronos was the God of absolute time, linear, chronological and quantifiable. Kairos was the god of timing, of opportunity, of choice and mischance, the auspicious and the not-so-auspicious. If you sleep because the clock tells you it is way past your bed time, it is chronological time. If you sleep because you are tired, that is kairological time. Kairological time is the spirit of the particular moment. It is a concept, time enlivened and various, time elastic and fertile.

WOMEN

If man has seven ages, women in contemporary Western society has only one. One young one. One fixed one. Time must be stayed, for women, like plastic - with plastic. HRT, cosmetic industry, and the cosmetic surgery all help towards this goal.

Female faces are plasticized into facile facsimile face-lifts. The face's whole meaning is a page to write your character on; the whole purpose of having a face is to show emotion in motion - the mobility at the heart of expressiveness. Obstetricians speed up labor with vacuum extraction or caesarian section. In its wise etymology, what does obstetrics mean? `To be present', to `stand at'. Not to speed up labor but to be present at it. Not to force a woman but to stand by her.

PROGRESS

Progress is only an idea, a mental construct, but it is treated as if it had the status of concrete fact, as if the march of progress had a sort of absolute inevitability and preordained certainty. Progressing into the future appeals because it claims an optimistic mobility while the whole idea of sustainability can be characterized as stasis.

Progress is a specific idea; western, money-oriented, and technologically biased. But it pretends to a universality, so that all peoples must be made to define and embrace progress in exactly the same way. Progress is two-faced; it has a lovely smile for the powerful and a cruel sneer for the poor and underprivileged.

Jay's holistic view of time resolves the modern dilemma - a meaningless existence and the Subtle Trap of Counterfeit Meaning. The Search For Meaning is vital precisely because without it, you fall prey to the lure of "counterfeit" meanings. If you make no effort to discover the meaning of your individual life, you thereby play host to an existential vacuum at the very core of your being. Thank the author Jay Griffiths and read her magnum opus with wonder and reverence. You will find the real meaning of your life. You can hear the language speaks instead of the author.

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Pip Pip: A Sideways Look At Time : An article from: The Ecologist

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A Sideways Look at Time
Jay Griffiths
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Sideways Look At Time
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