The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz Read Free Book Online Page A

forget that time itself has a history. Consider that only thirty-five years before Ferenczi’s essay, twenty-five nations in Europe and the Americas began the process of unifying all the local times around the globe into a single mesh of standard public time, dissecting the world into twenty-four time zones, with Greenwich, England, as the zero meridian. Not coincidentally, at the same point in history artists and writers were beginning to chronicle the rise of the diametrically opposite kind of time: idiosyncratic private time. Psychological man defined himself in opposition to the clock. In
The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918
, the cultural historian Stephen Kern proves this point by riffling through the works of the great turn-of-the-century chroniclers of consciousness: the philosopher Henri Bergson, the psychologist William James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and, of course, Freud. Kafka wrote: “It’s impossible to sleep, impossible to wake, impossible to bear life or, more precisely, the successiveness of life. The clocks don’t agree. The inner one rushes along in a devilish or demonic—in any case, inhuman—way while the outer one goes, falteringly, its accustomed pace.” Freud, ever the encyclopedist, saw that private time could sometimes be swift, sometimes be slow. Dreams turned the plodding sequences of waking life into rapid-fire montage, but the unconscious could move with glacial indifference to ordinary standards of time.
    Taken together as a dialectical unit, however, private and public time were eclipsing an older kind of time: religious time. Ferenczi may have elevated the Christian calendar, with its Sundays, to the public standard of all civilization, but by the early twentieth centuryfactories and department stores were no longer uniformly closing on Sundays, and Christians were beginning to grasp what it meant to worship as a minority (and were beginning to complain about it). Public time was time calibrated to the needs of transportation and production networks. Private time was equally desacralized and irreligious. Sacred calendars were—and are—sternly communitarian. Religious time does not strive to satisfy individual needs. It makes its own inexorable demands, flowing from prayer service to prayer service, from festival to festival.
    For men and women—or boys and girls—as determinedly forward-looking as Ferenczi and his patients were, religious time must have seemed vertiginously de trop. Think of sacred holidays as wells; they tunnel down through temporal strata and allow the past to bubble into the present through the liquid medium of myth. Keeping the Sabbath means sliding the cover off that hole on a weekly basis. It is easy to imagine a turn-of-the-century youth peering into the
mise en abyme
of time past that is the Sabbath and feeling sort of sick.
 6. 
    I N FERENCZI’S DAY , it was communitarian time that seemed on the verge of disappearing. Now family time does, too. Not long ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied life at Amerco, an unusually worker-friendly Fortune 500 company. In her 1997 book
The Time Bind
, she reported that workers had grown so entranced with life in their workplace that they’d started avoiding their less well-tended-to personal lives. To maximize the time spent in the office or on take-home work, they applied managerial principles of efficiency to their homes and their children. The faster the Amerco employee got through the dishes, the sooner she could get back to work.
    Today, work has grown even more portable, so that the work addict need never turn off her mobile communications device as she interacts with her family. This image of the workaholic may be a caricature, but caricatures only exaggerate the satirizable features of everyday life. And if there’s one thing we know about everyday life,it’s that we don’t have enough time to finish our work and get our chores done and be with family and friends.
    We don’t