VISITORS to New York鈥檚 Museum of Modern Art in 2010 got to meet time, face-to-face. For her show The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic sat, motionless, for 7.5 hours at a stretch while visitors wandered past her.
Unlike all the other art on show, she hadn鈥檛 鈥渄ropped out鈥� of time: this was no cold, unbreathing sculpture. Neither was she time鈥檚 plaything, as she surely would have been had some task engaged her. Instead, Marc Wittmann, a psychologist based in Freiburg, Germany, reckons that Abramovic became time.
Wittmann鈥檚 book Felt Time explains how we experience time, posit it and remember it, all in the same moment. We access the future and the past through the 3-second chink that constitutes our experience of the present. Beyond this interval, metronome beats lose their rhythm and words fall apart in the ear.
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鈥淏y removing the tedium of waiting, we have turned ourselves into sensation junkies鈥�
As unhurried and efficient as an ophthalmologist arriving at a prescription by placing different lenses before the eye, Wittmann reveals, chapter by chapter, how our view through that 3-second chink is shaped by anxiety, age, boredom, appetite and feeling.
Unfortunately, his approach smacks of the textbook, and his attempt at a 鈥渘ew solution to the mind-body problem鈥� is a mess. However, his literary allusions 鈥� from Thomas Mann鈥檚 study of habituation in The Magic Mountain to Sten Nadolny鈥檚 evocation of the present moment in The Discovery of Slowness 鈥� offer real insight. Indeed, they are an education in themselves for anyone with an Amazon 鈥渂uy鈥� button to hand.
As we read Felt Time, do we gain most by mulling Wittmann鈥檚 words, even if some allusions are unfamiliar? Or are we better off chasing down his references on the internet? Which is the more interesting option? Or rather: which is 鈥渓ess boring鈥�?
Sandi Mann鈥檚 The Upside of Downtime is also about time, inasmuch as it is about boredom.
Once we delighted in devices that put all knowledge and culture into our pockets. But our means of obtaining stimulation have become so routine that they have themselves become a source of boredom. By removing the tedium of waiting, says psychologist Mann, we have turned ourselves into sensation junkies. It鈥檚 hard for us to pay attention to a task when more exciting stimuli are on offer, and being exposed to even subtle distractions can make us feel more bored.
Sadly, Mann鈥檚 book demonstrates the point all too well. It is a design horror: a mess of boxed-out paragraphs and bullet-pointed lists. Each is entertaining in itself, yet together they render Mann鈥檚 central argument less and less engaging, for exactly the reasons she has identified. Reading her is like watching a magician take a bullet to the head while 鈥減erforming鈥� Russian roulette.
In the end Mann can鈥檛 decide whether boredom is a good or bad thing, while Wittmann鈥檚 more organised approach gives him the confidence he needs to walk off a cliff as he tries to use the brain alone to account for consciousness. But despite the flaws, Wittmann is insightful and Mann is engaging, and, praise be, there鈥檚 always next time.
MIT Press
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淧resent and correct鈥�
