In today's state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening . . . In the process of digitalization, . . . information acquires an altogether different status. Reality itself takes on the form of information and data. For the most part, we perceive reality in terms of information or through the lens of information. Information is an idea—that is, a re-representation. When reality takes the form of information, the immediate experience of presence withers. When digitalization gives everything the form of information, reality is flattened.

“It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose number is infinite) stand open night and day to men and also to animals. Anyone who wishes to enter may do so.”

Time has but one reality, the reality of the instant. Otherwise put, time is a reality confined to the instant and suspended between two voids. Although time will no doubt be reborn, it must first die. It cannot transport its being from one instant to another in order to forge a duration. The instant is already solitude . . . It is solitude in its barest metaphysical value. Yet an even more poignant solitude confirms the tragic solitude of the instant: through a sort of creative violence, time limited to the instant isolates us not only from others but even from ourselves, since it breaks with our most cherished past.

"The human circadian rhythm is both defined by biology and dependent on context. From a series of popular cave studies, where subjects were placed in experimental conditions of total darkness and isolation, we know that the body has an innate rhythm. Biologists have identified its genetic basis in a gene called the CLOCK gene (Circadian Locomotor Output Cycles Kaput). But without access to environmental cues like sunlight or social cues like an alarm clock—cues called Zeitgetbers, or “time givers”—the rhythm doesn’t sync to a twenty-four-hour day. Our circadian clocks affect most bodily processes, from digestion and metabolism to detoxification, blood pressure, and hormone fluctuation. Among all the Zeitgebers, sunlight is by far the most crucial for setting the clock. In simple terms, human health requires a regular daily pattern on local time.