Book review: A Sideways Look at Time

I'm having some insane burst of writerly vigor, so two posts in two days. How bizarre.

A Sideways Look at Time has been hanging 'round my neck for several months now. By the last two chapters, I'd had enough and just merrily skimmed along. I trudged [1] through as much of it as I did because it has insightful and prettily-worded bits. But some of it was just really aggravating. If I'd rolled my eyes any more while reading this book, they'd've [2] turned into ball-bearings. 

With that introduction, the program is as follows. First, a brief overview. Next, bits I genuinely enjoyed, for their sentence structure or their thought-provokingness. Finally, the bits that made me laugh derisively and/or rage (which truthfully may be the funniest part). 

Brief overview(s)

Objective: This is a somewhat overlong and winding book about mankind's relationship to time: the ins and outs of how the Western world has decimated other cultures' more natural and flexible conception of time, and how much Westerners lose out in their regimented and unforgiving view of time.

Subjective: A rather repetitive, very left-wing polemic on the evils of the West - ostensibly all related to its conception of time, but in actuality ranging all over topics from linguistics (yay!) to Monsanto corn. My favorite chapters were (of course) the one about myth (linguistics and storytelling, yay!) and the one about festival time (ritual and psychology, yay!) - my least favorite were the last few, where everything Griffith's had to say, she'd already said. 

Nice bits

1. "The everlasting consolation of the sea is not all will be well, but all will endure." 

I find this remarkably calming - right up there with Ecclesiastes'  "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." There is comfort in accepting that sometimes things don't work out, but that's okay.

2. " ' It is not time that passes, but ourselves.' " 

Leaving behind footprints on the sands of time - time is a human construct and human-influenced - the point is that we change, not that days go by.

3. Speaking of Princess Diana's death: "(It spoils the symmetry to deny [that the media killed her]; she was actually killed by speed and the car culture, but no matter. The narrative structure, embedded in the human mind, demands that the camera which created her was the camera which killed her. So be it.)" 

Narrative structure is powerful stuff, man. We like symmetry and parallelism in ours - so much so that, according to Griffiths, we're willing to ignore the truth. "What comfort is there in truth compared with a story?" - The Thirteenth Tale

4. "[T]he mythic moment is where the profane present meets a sacred eternity."

A beautifully worded turn-of-phrase.

5. " ' History is the truth that in the long run becomes a lie, whereas myth is a lie that in the long run becomes the truth.' " 

I love this idea. 

6. " 'If you can't hurl yourself down a steep hill after a few drinks chasing cheeses, what's the point of being British? Not even the Black Death stopped our cheese-rolling.' "

Eheheheh.

7. Explaining our fatigue at Christmastime, "Christmas bears a weight no one festival can happily sustain; hence Christmas stress..."

Especially apropos, as we all just did that Christmas thing. Basically, we need more holidays for letting off steam - and holidays, Griffiths points out, are different than vacations: holidays celebrate where/when you are, vacations take you away.

8. "...overemotional peasants who would follow any toothless prophet dribbling nutmeggy remarks and visionary cabbage into his beard." Nutmeggy remarks just sounds so delightfully British (which the author is), and Visionary Cabbage would make a great song title and/or band name. Or possibly sci-fi novel.

9. On cosmetic surgery: "She doesn't look young - she looks plastic. She doesn't look her age, true, but she doesn't look any other age either." 

Per my magazine epiphany: Every way you are is wrong. The cult of youth is damaging and dishonest. 

10. On ancient magics and rituals: "[I]t is but a skip between secretly knowing when something will happen and appearing to have caused it." Knowledge is power - to have people believe you can do something is almost (or entirely) as good as actually being able to do it. 

Eye-rolly bits

1. "Ancient maps are maps of being, marking dwelling. Here Be Dragons, Here Be Swamps, maps of place. ... Maps in everyday use today are very different; they show routes, so modernity's maps are increasingly maps of mobility not of location..." 

The point of a map is, and always has been, two-fold: to show location (as in, "I want to go to there") and to show routes ("and this is how I go to there"). It does little good to have a map that only shows you that there is a world beyond your immediate vicinity, with no way of moving yourself from here to there. 

2. "To speak to the driver, simple little commands of an emasculated language lie in elasticated letters on the road."

No. Just no. 

3. "Speed insists on the cliche...Language wants to take the scenic route." 

My verbatim annotation: No it doesn't! Lg wants to communicate, by any means possible.

4. "The folktale speaks uniquely to each child whereas the computer game is identical to every player, its narrative cannot have more than one meaning and remains unchanging over time. Folktales are rich in language..." 

Unconvinced. If the words of folktale are formulaic, as Griffith has just been noting, then there's no difference in a formulaic computer game. 

5. "Historic time, promulgated by patriarchal Judaeo-Christianity, favored by patriarchies since, uses the linear shape, phallic and male, rather than the elastic and ambiguous time of myth which seems female." 

Oh, for Freud's sake. 

6. "When biblical myths mustered their meanest might, they promised plagues, deaths [3] and a few thousand locusts, but nowhere in myth is there weather as cruel and frightening as the skies raining acid rain on us." 

Hail and fire don't count as frightening (Exodus 9:24)? A killing wind that swept through Egypt, taking the firstborn of every living thing isn't terrifying (Exodus 12:29-30)?

7. "If oaks could speak, they'd speak Latin." 

Nooo, any one language is as good as another. The emotional resonance of a particular tongue is nothing more than a human construct - to XYZ non-Western people, Latin would have no resonance, and no reason to be the "language of the oaks."

8. "The tradition of holding hands is a clutch at comfort and is also, perhaps, another instance of sympathetic magic, an attempt to encourage the new year to join hands with the old, to take time by the hand and pull it in, through the doorway of Janus."

 This sounds like something I would write when I needed just a feeeeew more lines to meet a page requirement on a particularly daft anthropology paper.

9. "The concepts of imperialism extend to outer space where astronomers use GMT to make their predictions, though they call it UT - Universal Time." 

I mean, what would you have them do? They have to chose something.

10. "In Papua New Ginea, the era of colonialism was called taim bilong masta in Pidgin." 

Captial-P Pidgin is the name of the creole spoken in Hawai'i; the name of the creole in PNG is Tok Pisin. 

11. "...a nurse heard him winding his watch and...found him dead. Watch in hand." 

Winding his watch, I'm very nearly certain, didn't kill him. 

xo,
Devo

[1] "To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on." - Chaucer, A Knight's Tale

[2] It's a travesty that double contractions aren't acceptable in standard writing.

[3] This is an Oxford comma-less text...perhaps that's the real reason we didn't entirely get on.