The most commonly used word in the English language is “time,” reports British author Simon Garfield, with “year” and “day” making the top five. We’re obsessed with time: how to measure it, spend it, save it, waste it, kill it or find more of it.
The prolific Garfield, with 17 previous nonfiction titles (Just My Type, The Age of Innocence), explores the timely topic of time in Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time. Published in the U.K. in 2016, it was named a book of the year in science (The Observer) and culture (The Sunday Times).
While other recent books advise how to make time work for us (Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing) or distil the complexities of time and space (Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry), Garfield takes a different tack. Timekeepers looks at human attempts throughout history to control time or find meaning within it.
Garfield tackles this massive topic in a series of light essays. We learn how the introduction of intercity trains in the 1830s forced the British to make timetables and synchronize clocks. We meet former track star Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute mile in 1954. We find out how the Beatles recorded their first album in a single day. We go behind the scenes in 1923 to watch silent film star Harold Lloyd dangle from the hands of a giant clock on a skyscraper. We travel to Switzerland to study Swiss watches.
There are some Canadian connections: Garfield describes, in engagingly tense detail, his perception of time speeding up as he anxiously struggles to deliver a long speech in the allotted 17-minute time frame at a Toronto IdeaCity conference. And there’s a chapter on how the Pulitzer-winning photo of Vietnamese “napalm girl” Kim Phuc, who lives in Ajax, Ont., became a moment frozen in time. But the star of the essay is photographer Nick Ut.
The essays are populated overwhelmingly by men. Indeed, some could be magazine features in Esquire. Some fly by, but a tedious one on experimental U.K. community Poundbury seems to go on forever.
There are flashes of Garfield’s dry humour. In discussing historical filibuster speeches, he writes we’re no longer impressed by things that take a long time, “except perhaps in the realms of underwater swimming and pornography.”
Garfield observes and reports but doesn’t much analyze. He never really answers “How the World Became Obsessed With Time.” Timekeepers may not reveal any insights into time, but it mostly offers a pleasant way of passing it.
Journalist Marcia Kaye is a frequent contributor to these pages.