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“For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season. When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink – in combination with the invention of electric light – allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle.”
Charles Czeisler, neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School, asserts that an example of the industrial revolution trumping taking away our reliance upon nature. In this instance, the distraction (the clock) replaced the initial focus (the seasons). T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic (January 2005), 15-16.
“You whose all-told is still no sum,”
Léonie Adams, “Grapes Making”
“Peaked margin of antiquity’s delay,
And we went there out of time’s monotone.”
Allen Tate, “The Mediterranean”
“I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“For I have known them all [time, hours, opportunities] already, known them all -
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
A reduplication of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 by T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Ask not (’tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb’d away.
Seize the present; trust to-morrow e’en as little as you may.
Horace, Odes, I.11, Translated by John Conington.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.
Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
“In . . . boredom there is a distortion of time – it seems to stand still. There German word for boredom, langeweile, literally means a ‘long time.’”
Richard Winter reminds us of the following; Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 28.
