circle thinking

“I knew what depression was. I’ve known what it was since I was at least sixteen. That was the first year in which I unequivocally wished for death: not in a melodramatic emo-kid way, but in a lumpen, constant-state-of-passive- suicidal-ideation way. I did not act out. I didn’t drink, do drugs, sleep around, or even date. I abhorred physical contact and wondered if I might be asexual; that’s how disinterested and disgusted I felt at the thought of anyone embracing me, kissing me, taking my clothes off. I was an underweight overachiever with no school spirit. “You’re so laid-back,” my friends would say. I wasn’t; I just had zero affect.”

“The clock – not money – emerged as the key technology for measuring the value of work. This distinction is crucial because it’s easy to think that working for wages is capitalism’s signature. It’s not: in thirteenth-century England a third of the economically active population depended on wages for survival. That wages became a decisive way of structuring life, space, and nature owes everything to a new model of time.

“The ultimate and perhaps most significant conversion of reality into numbers is the measurement of time. Clocks do to time what name and number do to the material world: they reduce it, make it finite. And what is time, but life itself? Time is experience, process, the flow of being. By measuring time, by converting it into numbers, we rob it of its infinitude and uniqueness in precisely the same way that nouns and numbers reduce the physical world. Time measurement turns a succession of unique moments into just so many seconds, minutes, and hours, and denies the particularity of each person’s subjective experience of them.

“The clock, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, represents the key machine of the machine age, both for its influence on technology and its influence on the habits of men. Technically, the clock was the first really automatic machine that attained any importance in the life of men.”

“I used to consider absence a lack. And I ignorantly regretted that lack. Today I have nothing to regret. There is no lack in absence. Absence is a presence in me. And I feel it, a perfect whiteness, so close and cozy in my arms that I laugh, dance, and invent glad exclamations, since absence, this embodied absence, can’t be taken away from me.”