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Author InterviewsJames Gleick Catches Up With TimeDave Weich, Powells.com
"A compression of time characterizes the life of the century now closing," James Gleick writes in Faster. Consider, for example, overnight mail, itself a fairly recent phenomenon. "In the world before FedEx, when 'it' could not absolutely, positively be there overnight, it rarely had to," Gleick explains. "Now that it can, it must." And now, only a few years later, faxes, email, and the Internet have rendered even FedEx too slow for many jobs. Do people really want to live at this pace? Clearly, some do. But what are the costs? "It might be simplest to recognize that there is time - however much time - and we make choices about how to spend it, how to spare it, how to use it, and how to fill it," Gleick writes. Those choices, of course, will go a long way toward determining the pace if not the quality of our lives.
James Gleick: That was a whole thread of the story that didn't exist when I conceived the book. It was possible to think of our world speeding up in all these ways without even considering the Internet - so the book changed. The world changed while I was working on the book. As I say in the new Afterword [to the trade paperback edition], the book is already out of date in so many ways. I shouldn't act surprised, right? Dave: How long did you work on it? Gleick: It was five years - with interruptions. Dave: Many of the details will become quaint and obsolete just by their nature - that's very much a theme of the book itself: instant obsolescence. Gleick: I knew it when I was writing. I made a conscious decision to include a lot of detail. This stuff from popular culture, by definition, it's not of lasting significance. Dave: Were there particular areas of research that became especially interesting for you. Any surprises? Gleick: I'm not sure how to answer that. The book is based on a preconception about the subject. It might not have been true, but I had a growing conviction that an essential feature of modern life - maybe the essential feature, the big story - is the change in our relationship with time. It pervades so many different areas: communication, technologies, our work lives, the pace of popular entertainment. The more I worked on the book, the happier I was with that preconception. I talked myself into it. But when you start to think this way, you see how we're bombarded with these changes all the time. I believe that people who read the book, the next time they watch tv, will notice that many commercials not only operate on a fast internal schedule in terms of their own structure, but are about speed or our obsession with speed - are offering us some way of saving time or speeding something up. The Olympics come along, for example, and each time, you're struck by how narrow the margins are getting and how important it is to have technologies that measure time in fine intervals. Not so long ago, hundredths of a second didn't matter; now in some races they count thousandths of a second. And it affects the coverage, itself. You can read the minds of the programmers, asking how are they supposed to hold your attention span. So there was no one thing that surprised me. Lots of individual facts or pieces of news will surprise some readers, but there's no one thing in the book that nobody knows about. A lot of it is familiar to us. I hope what's useful and original about the final product is that it ties things together. Dave: Faster shows us again and again: this is not new. For various reasons, technological advances and so forth, we're accelerating at a faster pace than ever before, but as a species this is not a new trend, a new phenomenon. We simply have more tools at our disposal to enact the acceleration Gleick: It's a paradox I had to cope with in organizing the book. On the one hand, I was trying to write about something that I felt was new, and on the other hand, as you say, I had to face the reality that all through human history people have been complaining about the acceleration of things and the loss of some kind of mythical past where things were slower and more leisurely. So is it new or isn't it? That's a fair question. I think our acceleration, here at the end of the twentieth century, is in fact different and more stressful in a lot of ways, and more profound in some ways, than the kind of acceleration people worried about when the telephone or the railroad arrived, for example, even though those things caused profound changes in the nature of human life. Dave: One argument put forth is that the acceleration now applies to virtually every aspect of our lives. It seems harder and harder to stay apart from it, to resist. Also, there seems more and more to be a threat that you can't keep up with it. While it's important to note that only a small minority of human beings are on the Internet or have Palm Pilots, the rate at which these technologies are developing results in an inevitable and almost immediate obsolescence. We sell electronic books for people to download into their portable e-readers, for instance. Well, one thing you rarely hear from the media is that the devices themselves will be completely worthless in a very short period of time. Another, better model will become available, and a consumer will either upgrade or fall behind. Get it now - it's faster and better than ever before! - and guaranteed to be available in a faster and more powerful model before you've even learned how to use it. Gleick: There are double-edged swords of this kind all through the book. On the one hand, fast technological change is something we seem to like. After all, it's us humans who are adopting these technologies. Most people didn't have email when I started working on the book. Was it foisted on us by the capitalist system or did we want it? That's not an easy question to answer. I'm trying to cherish my ambivalence about these things. Sometimes I think of course we chose it. Nobody's holding a gun to your head saying you have to go check your email right now. But that's not always true: sometimes you have to have email because your employer demands it. And that's another scary trend: the loss of a clear boundary between our work lives and our play lives. You can be reached anywhere. That guy you see carrying his cell phone to the beach, does he want to have it or does he have to? It's not always clear. I'm kind of a gadget-happy guy so I'm not going to wag my finger and tell people to slow down. In writing the book, I tried to understand it as well as I could and put it all out there. Dave: One point you make, though, that really rings true is how hard it is to make a clear distinction between work and leisure. Personally, I do a lot of writing. I work an awful lot at home. But if I'm surfing book sites at home, is that research or relaxation? The time I spent reading your books to prepare for this interview - was that work or pleasure? Someone asked me recently whether I bill Powell's for that time, and I thought, My God, I'd be on the clock sixteen hours a day! Gleick: There's controversy about whether we're working harder than ever before. I took clear sides on that issue in the book, but even so I found the arguments really interesting and significant. Even if it's not literally true, even if you can't demonstrate it with statistics, a lot of people want to believe we're working longer hours than humans have ever had to. Some people make a claim that I find silly: that in primitive societies people didn't have to work so hard; they could spend a lot of time just enjoying nature. That's a crazy myth. We're talking about human beings living on the edge of subsistence. Things that come to us very easily were either totally out of their grasp or they had to work really hard to get them. But it's a hard question, and there's a psychological reality, too. And it's undeniable that some kinds of work have become more intense because of our sophistication about time and our employers' sophistication, even obsession with it. Dave: A friend works at an ad agency down the street. They have foosball and a pool table in the office. It seems like they're never working - but they're at work the whole time. At my previous job, we drank beer at our desks every Friday, and sometimes other days, too. But what is the right way to appropriate your time? Something that really resonated for me when I read it in college was a line from Thoreau - "as if you could kill time without injuring eternity," he wrote in Walden. When most people think of Thoreau, they think of a quiet life in a cabin in a lakeside woods, but here he was saying, "God forbid if you waste ten seconds . . ." Gleick: That's a great line. Somewhere in the book, I quote Thoreau because I was struck by how he described the fast pace at a railroad station - and he really seemed to like it. People were being fulfilled in some way that they hadn't before. As you say, you think of Thoreau as the ultimate anti-technology, anti-capitalist kind of person, but he wasn't. Dave: It's becoming more and more common to find that authors are doing something for themselves on the web. Do you do the actual work on your web site? Gleick: I've had strong feelings about it for some years. I had a running battle with Viking, the publisher of Chaos, who isn't my publisher any more, because I thought, What a great Chaos web site you could do! Let's get into the modern world. They never did anything I liked, so I did the web site for Faster myself. I won't make any great claims for the site - it certainly isn't selling books; it's not really designed to. I'm not sure what it contributes. It does have some links, and that's what it was meant to do, to point outward, but I can't keep it up to date. I'm just one guy working on my next book, and I can't give it the kind of commitment it deserves. I'm also Vice President of the Authors Guild, and we're wrestling with this, thinking about ways we can make it easier for our members to have their own sites if they want them. Dave: Certainly having a web site is a good way to create a grassroots connection with your readers. I looked up your name on Google, and the first listing that came up was your personal web site. That's great if I'm an interested reader. I can immediately find other things you've written, links to other relevant pages, and pieces that aren't widely available elsewhere. Gleick: Freelance stuff I've written can be found there, and that's sort of a good thing. Wearing my hat as a protector of authors' rights, ideally I would be getting paid for the electronic reproduction of my writing, and on my web site it's free, but it's good. Stuff that would otherwise just be wrapping fish now is available for anyone who wants it. That seems worthwhile. Dave: How did working on Faster compare to working on Genius, the biography of Richard Feynman? Gleick: There's a lot of reporting in Faster, places I went with a notebook in my hand to see how things worked. I liked doing that. I always felt that was a more productive kind of research than library research, but there's a lot of library research in it, too. There's been more stuff written on the philosophy of time and the psychology of time than you or I would have time to read. The topic is infinite, so in the case of Faster I was never going to be finished. I'd never reach the end of the story, whereas if you're writing a biography, you know the end of the story. Genius felt like a project with real closure; Faster felt like a project that I was ending when I felt like it was enough of a book. And yet, you notice that biographies tend to be really long. You get sucked into a person's life. Even though the outlines of the story are finite, the story isn't finite at all. You could never reach the end of the human beings who had some contact with Feynman, who felt their lives were affected by him, and you can never reach the end of the physics he touched on. People's lives become infinite in a way. If you want to do the perfect job as a biographer, that's just as limitless as this kind of general "look at modern life" kind of book. Dave: If anyone is deserving of a large biography, Feynman would seem to qualify. Gleick: I loved working on that book. I was so absorbed by him. I never met him, but I was very lucky right from the outset to have access to great material. He never threw anything out. There were wonderful letters. I'm working on a short biography now of Newton, but it's a completely different thing. If I spent the rest of my life on it, I'd never feel like I was getting into Newton's skin like I did with Feynman. I'll probably never do that again. Dave: One connection of which I was completely unaware until reading Genius: I didn't know that Feynman was on the committee to investigate the space shuttle disaster. The teacher who died on that flight was from my hometown. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and Christa McAuliffe's family lived a mile or two from my school. I don't think I'll ever forget that day. Gleick: I was starting my leave of absence to work on Chaos. I was at a physics conference. I flew down that day, and when I arrived I found a whole bunch of physicists gathered around a tv in a hotel hallway. It was a real shock. Dave: When a book about a potentially dry and off-putting subject (and it's not hard to imagine a book about chaos theory being completely unreadable to anyone other than scientists), well, I'm fascinated when an author can take such a difficult topic and turn it into a bestseller without really dumbing it down. And that was your first book. People in the store talk about it in reverential tones. It brought a lot of readers to that subject who otherwise wouldn't have had access. Gleick: I like some things about that book very much, but in some ways I like the others better. Chaos was a great subject, but it may be that some of the things people really like about the book are not my contributions but just how great the story was, the work being done by these scientists. Maybe I was very lucky to have that topic at that moment, but I hope I'm still growing as a writer. Dave: To write about advanced subjects for broader audiences than academia, writing for a well-informed, but general readership...are you writing for a particular audience? Are you writing for yourself? Gleick: For myself. And for people who know what I know and are interested in these things. What else have I got to go on? Writing about science poses a peculiar problem: I don't have a background in science. I've had to learn as I went along. In some ways, when I'm writing about Feynman and quantum electrodynamics, I'm on thin ice. I'm skating right at the edge of what I know. I'm not dumbing it down in an effort to attract a wide audience. I'm trying to write about it in a way that I understand. But if I believe that the story is important, whatever story it is that I'm telling at the time, and I'm a citizen of the culture...well if Feynman's life is important to me, and I'm not a physicist, I've got to explain why. Why is a person whose work is way over our heads and in fact only understood by a few specialists, why is his life significant to the world in the twentieth century? The same thing with Chaos: it was interesting to me, so I had to trust that it would be interesting to other people who weren't necessarily scientists. I came out of journalism, where you think of a thing as news. If it's news, it's worth reporting, but you have to explain why it matters. Dave: I love the fact that as the editor of Best American Science Writing 2000 you included an article from The Onion. It really speaks to the questions you pose in the book's Introduction: what is science writing and how can it be defined? Was the Best American editorship a fun project? Gleick: It was. You can see that I wanted to have a mix of things, and that's one reason why The Onion piece is in there. But also, that piece played to some of my prejudices about the world and why science writing matters; they were right on the money about how stupid some of our ideas are about what is and isn't science. This is important. We live in a complicated world; we need to be able to distinguish what's true from what's false. We're living through a bizarre Presidential election right now. We ought to have enough understanding of statistics to judge these events with the proper perspective. If we don't understand, we're susceptible to being victimized to false beliefs, which can be harmful - but this is all sounding a lot more ponderous and pompous than when The Onion writes about it, which is why I thought they did such a great job. James Gleick
visited Powell's City of Books on November 15, 2000.
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