Saving Time
Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
“This book is my panoramic assault on nihilism,” writes Jenny Odell in the introduction to Saving Time. That assault consists of a wide-ranging meditation on many aspects of “time” as we know it: the counting clock of labor time, free time and the freedom (or lack thereof) that accompanies it, time management, leisure, experience and experimentation, multiple futures and histories, mosses and trees and birds and oceans. There’s too much to really capture in a neat takeaway, which seems apt somehow: time—real time, not the atomized time of the clock but time as embodied and lived—is too much to get your head around all at once. You can look at a few facets while the rest of it scatters light all around you. But turn it and you’ll see something else. Odell makes clear how much more we’re missing.