Discoveries
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Beyond 9 to 5
Your Life in Time
Sarah Norgate
Columbia University Press: 192 pp., $24.50
SARAH NORGATE, a British lecturer in psychology, shows us how our relationship with time compares with that of people in other countries and periods. Chapters on time as a cultural issue, as a neurological issue, as it pertains to longevity and relationships: So much is here -- recent studies, fascinating facts, thought-provoking ruminations -- that her book is best read slowly. Adults spend on average seven minutes a day reading books, hardly enough to “better understand links between behaviour, brain and genes ... in the wider context of the influences of society and culture.” But this reader now wants to better understand her relationship with time and how it may be shortening her life. Some striking bits: annual hours spent at work in Los Angeles, 1,939, oddly more than in New York (1,882), Tokyo (1,864) or London (1,833). Life expectancy in 200 BC Rome, 18 years; in 18th century France and sub-Saharan Africa since the AIDS epidemic, 35 years. Happily, it is possible, Norgate notes, to re-create a sense of timelessness anywhere (at home, at work, at play, in mid-crisis), a skill worth cultivating.
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The Day of Their Wedding
A Novel
William Dean Howells
Green Integer: 144 pp., $12.95 paper
LORENZO and Althea run away from their Shaker “Family” in Massachusetts to get married. Overcome by “foolish feelings” (what the Shakers call love), they elope by train to start a new life in the “world-outside.” William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881, wrote several works of fiction and nonfiction, most famously “The Rise of Silas Lapham” (1885). “The Day of Their Wedding” (1895) is the story of the elopers’ one and only full day together. Althea experiences each novelty -- the stranger who speaks to her, the sight of her beloved in “outside” clothing, the taste of restaurant food -- as a shock. Lorenzo has a hard time getting her to remove her bonnet. Both have trouble giving up the “angelic” for the “earthly” life. A cabdriver (horse and buggy) offends them by his familiarity; much of their new life seems to require financial transactions. All in all, the world-outside dismays them. They ask a minister to marry them; he’s fascinated by their views on love (“a kind of leading”) and marriage (because Shakers have all things in common, they explain, and because Jesus did not marry, Shakers do not). They complete the ceremony, but in the end homesickness triumphs over love. In its quiet way, it’s an agonizing novel. Howell’s yearning for a purer life shines through; he is clearly drawn to the beauty and simplicity of the Shakers and repulsed by the crassness of the world-outside and its spiritual poverty.
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Big Sur Inn
The Deetjen Legacy
Anita Alan
Gibbs Smith: 160 pp., $29.95
EVEN if you’ve never driven past the Big Sur Inn on Route 1, much less fallen into its old-world arms at the end of a long drive or a hard week, you’ll relish this illustrated story of its founding. Its rooms, grounds and common rooms are on a different (more human) scale than those of its larger, fancier neighbors. Helmuth Deetjen and his wife, Helen, came to Big Sur in the mid-1930s. Helen bought 3.95 acres along Castro Creek, where the couple camped and painted and built the cabin that would grow into the inn that climbs the hillside. Their interest in metaphysics, psychology, theater and literature drew artists and writers to the inn, which opened in 1947. Photos of Hollywood-handsome Helmuth and of Helen reading in a campsite hammock or dipping her feet in the creek recall a slower, sweeter time, which today’s visitors feel as soon as they pull into the driveway, where dogs and fallen pears clog the road. Warm light shines from windows; voices and music waft onto winding lanes. The photos, and poems and drawings by visitors, evoke the spirit of Big Sur. Turning the pages will suffice in the long months between visits.
