Jenny Odell (The Bodley Head)
THE covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to re-evaluate our relationship with time by removing us from our usual routines. But in Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock, Jenny Odell tries to help the reader overhaul even their most basic conceptions of time.
Odell鈥檚 first book 鈥� How to Do Nothing, published in 2019 鈥� was a bestseller. It was simultaneously a critique of the attention economy, largely propagated by social media giants, and a lyrical description of the pleasures of birdwatching.
Advertisement
There, she compared much of the contextless internet 鈥� a world in which an Instagram post about the war in Ukraine may follow an image of a cute dog 鈥� with the context and physical gravity of seeing and paying attention to a bird in your local park.
Her new book is no less grand in its ambitions, setting out to deconstruct the economic and political origins of using clocks to delineate and measure our lives, and pointing to the natural world as providing another way to think about time. Odell uses geology to detail her thoughts about a concept of time that isn鈥檛 defined by cultural notions of an 8-hour workday or 鈥渢ime is money鈥�.
In one section, Odell examines a horizontally ridged surface of striated rock that she finds on a pebble beach a few kilometres from her home in Oakland, California. The ridges align with stripes seen in the larger striated rocks that surround her. Each stripe on the rocks is a layer of sediment deposited underwater between 65 million and 100 million years ago, she writes. But on the beach, tectonic activity has folded the deposits by about 63 degrees, so the layers that built up over time, from bottom to top, now appear to run askew. 鈥淭ime runs sideways across the beach,鈥� Odell writes: for her, the stripes are now time itself.
Odell, who is also a multi-disciplinary artist, wrote Saving Time during the pandemic. And as a native Californian, she writes extensively about the forest fires that ravaged the state during that period. Climate anxiety permeates her book, and in writing about time, Odell is also writing about the feeling that many people have right now: that it is too late to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
She explains that she wrote the book to save her life, to combat the dread she was feeling. Seeing time only through clocks will never give you any kind of appreciation of time on a larger scale, of oceans and mountains that go beyond our invention of the clock, Odell writes. That is the kind of appreciation needed at a time of climate change.
While Saving Time can meander and isn鈥檛 as focused as Odell鈥檚 previous effort, the writing is still a pleasure to read and it is certainly thought-provoking. The book isn鈥檛 necessarily hopeful for the future, but neither is it hopeless 鈥� and at this point, maybe that is the best we can ask for.
