The Guardian Bookshop makes over 180,000 books available with up to 40% discount, as well as highlighting some of our favourite publications in each genre.
Find out more.
This item is currently re-printing. You may still order this book and we will despatch it as soon as it becomes available.
Bookmark this page:
About this book
Guardian & Observer reviews
Look inside
Synopsis
Examines a range of materials - from Hippocrates to Run Lola Run - to put forth a conception of time and its limits that, unlike older models, is firmly grounded in human experience. This work concludes that time functions as a kind of sixth sense - the crucial sense that enables the other five.
Book Details
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Publication Date:
12-Dec-2008
ISBN:
9780226886015
Guardian review
On Borrowed Time
Steven Poole the guardian Sat 17 January 2009
What a cunning plan, to write a book about a topic that exerts a particular fascination on book reviewers. In fact, Weinrich doesn't discuss deadlines until the very end of the book - though that arrangement does nicely mimic the person cramming a task into the last available minutes. The preceding outlines a broader philosophy of time that takes off from Hippocrates's aphorism: "Art is long, and life short". "Following the Fates and Hans Blumenberg," the author murmurs, "I will call this incongruity the Hippocratic time-shear (Zeitschere)", to which it would be invidious to raise any objection, especially when he is shortly to refer delightfully to "the misconceived life of people who are always busy".
So how should we think of our own span and what to do in it? We could write books of aphorisms, or learn from the author's mostly illuminating readings of Keats, Corneille, Wilde, Goethe et al. It all comes together in the brilliant final section, which unpacks the adage "time is money" into a fantasia on temporal economics (all the more relevant to current events for its silence about them). Odd that there is no mention of Einstein, but this is a deeply cultured book that graciously declines to outstay its welcome.