The Sabbath World (17 page)

By the end of the scene in the Capernaum synagogue, we have completed the transition into the apocalyptic mode. The hero—the deus ex machina—has made himself known in a leveling burst of glory. The moment is now. From here on in, the pace will be swift, the pitch operatic. Those who refuse to budge from these inert patches of time and space, from Sabbath and Temple, will never know the bliss of the promised end.

T
ODAY, THE PACE
of life has quickened even more dramatically than in the book of Mark, and larger-than-life superheroes race to narrative climaxes on every possible electronic platform. We live as Mark wrote, in a state of apocalyptic urgency. Relatively few of us believe that Jesus is about to return, but just over the horizon of waking life, in nightmares and disaster movies and science-fiction novels, visions of the end play themselves out—clashes of civilizations or meteorological convulsions or nuclear holocausts or financial catastrophe or some combination thereof. We attribute the swiftness with which life sweeps past us not to God and the forces of redemption but to social forces beyond our control. In our Durkheimian era, God is another word for the awesome power of organized collective entities.

If you want to blame something for the heavy, humiliating sense of time moving above and beyond our control, you should, as you already know, blame clocks. You should specifically blame railroad clocks. And wireless telegraphs. Fifteenth-century church clocks abstracted
time into money; nineteenth-century railroad clocks abstracted local time into global time; but railroad clocks also synchronized schedules across vast swaths of terrain—mountains, plains, deserts, jungles, villages, and cities—thereby forcing the industrialized nations to standardize their systems of time measurement. And then, at the turn of the twentieth century, came the wireless telegraph with its magical instantaneity, which made the industrialized nations coordinate their time zones with one another, and then with the developing nations, making the reach of standard time truly global.

With this integration came simultaneity, the sense that thousands of events were taking place at once in thousands of places. People began to learn, first from the telegraph, then from radio, newsreels, television, and the Internet, that what was happening
now
, all over the globe, mattered more than what was happening
here
.

The communications scholar Manuel Castells talks about the “space of flows,” which he contrasts with the “space of places.” The space of flows is the space of the electronic circuits, nodes, and hubs that transmit the bytes that bind us together into social networks. The space of places is what the space of flows leaves behind—the decaying streets and buildings and bridges and cemeteries and rivers and oceans that used to mark the boundaries of our individual worlds.

Castells draws a similar contrast between what he calls “linear, irreversible, measurable, predictable time” and “timeless time.” Linear time moves forward, proceeding according to a traditional and prescribed sequence of events. You are born. You grow up, get a job, marry, and have children. You acquire your storehouse of memories. Your children grow up and do the same. You retire. You die. In timeless time, the life cycle loses its familiar rhythms. Vacation times vary, as the blocks of leisure associated with summer give way to the new economy’s need for flexible work schedules (“just-in-time labor”). Reproductive schedules vary. It is no longer necessary to give birth in the first half of your life; the fertility industry has made it possible for women to bear children after menopause. The age of death varies, and may one day be suspended indefinitely. Not that these gyrations in biological time are all bad. They may turn out to be liberating. After all,
only malleable work schedules will allow women to remain in the workforce and care for their children in a manner acceptable to them.

Nevertheless, when you dissolve the old structures and boundaries of time—the calendar of holidays and festivals, the geographical distances, the chronobiological cycles—you remove the brakes that slow down the perpetual motion machine of postindustrial capitalism. Marx was the first to point out that divorcing time from context and commodifying it as money leads directly to temporal compression. When time is money, speed equals more of it. He who can make more of something in less time gets to slash prices or beat his competitor into stores, and he who can produce faster must, or risk going out of business when a competitor does it first. And when the market picks up the pace, so do our lives. Milestones skitter past us like videos in fast-forward: friendships and marriages form and dissolve; homes are bought and sold; jobs are taken and left. Death is no longer certain. Nor are taxes. The only thing that can be guaranteed is that long before we’re ready, we—our professional know-how, our familiarity with the world, our sense of style—will have become obsolete.

We think of inevitable obsolescence as new, and certainly we grow obsolete faster than we used to, but the experience is old. Some poor soul from an ancien régime is always being left behind. Some poor rural Israelite is always feeling the anguish of watching her children seduced into new, gleaming gymnasiums and a new, faster, more cosmopolitan way of life. In
The Education of Henry Adams
, Henry Adams offers a snapshot of this eternally recurring process. Adams is describing “the law of acceleration” of progress, which, he says, speeded up to such a degree after 1900 that a person born in one generation could no longer learn anything worth knowing from a teacher born in the previous one. In the century leading up to 1900, there emerged a set of “supersensual forces,” by which he meant steam power, gunpowder, electricity, instruments of measurement that far surpassed the capacities of the human senses. Before these vast engines, Adams says, “the man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as, in the fourth century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of Christ.”

Adams’s metaphor says a lot. Christ was not a “supersensual force” in the technological sense that Adams gave the term, nor did he change time as materially as the clock did. But he ushered in an intensified, quickened experience of time. The tragedy of Christ’s death, coupled with the promise of his return, endowed the time in between—the
nun
, as it was called in Greek, or the now—with a previously unimaginable electricity. I call this time the superpresent. Christian theology distinguishes between two temporal orders: the time of
chronos
, the Greek word for “passing time,” and the time of
kairos
, Greek for “moment of crisis.” To convert to early Christianity would have been to plunge from
chronos
to
kairos
, from a life measured out in minute increments of ritual performance into the midst of one of the greatest dramas ever played out in cosmic history.

The literary critic Frank Kermode puts it this way: Once the Christ came along to redeem humankind and remedy the consequences of the Fall, “a new series of time began, and it was somehow, at least potentially, of a different quality; the Incarnation entailed the intervention of God into human time, after which nothing could be as it was.” Paul made a similar point when he wrote to the Galatians about “the fulness of the time.” The time is full, Paul explains, because it is the moment when God “sent forth his Son.” Kierkegaard called the fullness of time “the pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new.” Paul endows this overplenitude with an aching sensuality. The fullness of time is the moment when God (through Christ and the Holy Spirit) invades the present and fills it with his presence.

Imagine how elating it must have been to convert to Christianity. You fled the bodily, the time-bound, that which was subject to decay; you were caught up in something bigger and swifter and more powerful than yourself. “Have you ever had a gallop on a horse?” asks the greatest of all Christian apologists, C. S. Lewis, in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. Lewis is describing Lucy and Susan’s ride on the back of Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus in his allegorical Narnia series. “Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bits and imagine instead the almost noiseless
padding of the great paws. Then imagine instead of the black and gray or chestnut back of the horse the soft roughness of the golden fur, and the mane flying back in the wind. And then imagine you are going about twice as fast as the fastest racehorse. But this is a mount that doesn’t need to be guided and never grows tired. He rushes on and on, never missing his footing, never hesitating, threading his way with perfect skill between tree-trunks, jumping over bush and briar and the smaller streams, wading the larger, swimming the largest of all.”

H
OW DO YOU EXPLAIN
what time feels like to someone right out of college? I can only tell you what time felt like to me. It felt like a timed test that I was flunking.

I had discovered, at college, that there were people who seemed predestined to succeed, as if good fairies had granted success as their gift at their baptisms. I had had the vague idea that accomplishment was something you attained after serving a long apprenticeship at some difficult trade, years and years after college. But by the time I graduated, I understood that the future had long since arrived. Jodie Foster was in my class; she put on weight and looked deceptively like the rest of us, but she nonetheless moved in a much faster lane. I had classmates who had written novels and directed movies by the time they arrived, and still others (or the same ones) who had published their novels with respectable publishing houses, gotten deals with Hollywood, and launched magazines by the time they left.

These classmates went to New York, as I did. My friends and I were fact-checkers, production assistants, paralegals. They were editors, writers, nonprofit entrepreneurs. We ran into them at parties and tried to cloak envy in self-mocking wit. We were above all those books that promised success through effective time management, but whenever we could we sneaked peeks at them in the bookstore.

It was the late 1980s, the end of the Reagan administration and the ascendancy of the yuppie, and those of my classmates who hadn’t found a perch on the fast track of a Hollywood studio had snagged
jobs at Goldman Sachs or Citibank or McKinsey. I had grown up on the literature of countercultural, therapeutic self-actualization—Theodore Roszak and Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, those questers for ecstasy and authenticity and true selves—and felt stranded by my classmates and their carefully plotted plans, career ladders, salaries, bonuses, promotions. I found an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which in the early nineties wasn’t the hipster enclave it would later become. It was still Polish and poor, with row houses clad in aluminum siding and a main street, called Manhattan Avenue, packed with discount stores and dimly lit Cuban-Chinese and Polish restaurants. My apartment sat above a Chinese restaurant. I shared it with a fellow student, Sasha, from the graduate program in journalism that I had dropped out of. It was a strange apartment, with three shallow front rooms and no doors. We lived at opposite ends of the apartment, with no privacy from each other or from the outside world. We were too high up to be seen from the street; but for that, we might have been objects on display in a shop window.

But it was light and cheap and only half an hour from the East Village. We liked the shouts and honks of Manhattan Avenue. It suited our sense of being transient and public, exposed to the wave patterns of some higher, faster, not quite visible flux. We ate takeout from cheap Polish cafeterias; we drank in Polish bars; we went to parties thrown by people on the art scene that was just emerging in Williams-burg. We walked down the dark, empty cobblestoned street over which loomed shuttered warehouses and the old Domino factory. We thought of ourselves as tourists, though the locals must have seen us as something much more dangerous, as gentrifiers. They were right, but wrong. We didn’t want to burrow in and make Greenpoint our home. We were busy. We had to maximize our potential; we had to make good on our promise. The first day of every month, I walked down to the second floor and gave our landlady the rent check with a twinge of shame. She spoke no English, but if she could have, I thought she’d say, “What? You still here?”

I tried to make the time pay, but with little result. I had a half-formed notion that I should be a producer of culture, perhaps in the
film industry, maybe on the business side. Not that I cared a whit about the business side. I thought that knowing how money worked would give me the leverage to make Great Art. I was an assistant at a distribution company that marketed foreign films. I was a production assistant on a television shoot. I did secretarial work for a feminist filmmaker in a huge, messy loft in SoHo. I wrote press releases for an avant-garde film collective in Tribeca.

Since then I have read many sociological studies of alienated, unemployed, unrealistic youth, probably because I recognize in them versions of myself, odious as that comparison is, given their infinitely less privileged backgrounds and their complete lack of options and safety nets. In one such study, a sociologist contrasted young people who take
time out
—that is, postpone their career or education in order to enrich themselves—and those who
drop out
, or fall off the train of productive, career-building moving-toward-the-future time. One dropout in the study, Linda, spoke of becoming a nurse’s assistant but did nothing to achieve that goal. Time was not real to her. She felt detached from it, uprooted, and that made her feel unreal, too. The days floated past her meaninglessly, and nothing that happened in the present seemed to bear any relationship to the future, which existed in its own contained imaginary bubble.

I felt what she felt, even though I was not a dropout. Time was unreal to me. It passed, but overhead, with a
whoosh
like Aslan. Time never entered my body; it was never anything that I could grab hold of. I lived shamefully outside its rules, outside its limits, beyond its boundaries. I wanted to bring about an end to this dreary sense of time moving beyond my control, but I felt too weightless to change. If the Christian kind of timelessness lifted you above time, this kind dropped you outside it. My job interviews generally ended as I imagine Linda’s did. Employers would ask me to explain myself, and I would speak quickly and fluently about my goals at
that
point and
that
point and why I’d done
that
, but in the end I could not make my story make sense. I usually ended up kicking my legs in my chair like a five-year-old.