life for the synchronization of human tasks. The acceptance of 
such fragmenting of life into minutes and hours was 
unthinkable, save in highly literate communities. Readiness to 
submit the human organism to the alien mode of mechanical 
time was as dependent upon literacy in the first Christian 
centuries as it is today. For the clock to dominate, there has to 
be the prior acceptance of the visual stress that is inseparable 
from phonetic literacy. Literacy is itself an abstract asceticism 
that prepares the way for endless patterns of privation in the 
human community. With universal literacy, time can take on 
the character of an enclosed or pictorial space that can be 
divided and subdivided. It can be filled-in. “My schedule is filled 
up.” It can be kept free: “I have a free week next month.” And 
as Sebastian de Grazia has shown in Of Time, Work and  
Leisure , all the free time in the world is not leisure, because 
leisure accepts neither the division of labor that constitutes