and the electric uses of work and time, is able to provide us 
with real entertainment by simply squinting, now with one eye, 
now with the other, at the time and work picture. Cultures like 
ours, poised at the point of transformation, engender both 
tragic and comic awareness in great abundance. It is the 
maximal interplay of diverse forms of perception and experience 
that makes great the cultures of the fifth century B.C., the 
sixteenth century, and the twentieth century. But few people 
have enjoyed living in these intense periods when all that 
ensures familiarity and security dissolves and is reconfigured in 
a few decades.

     It was not the clock, but literacy reinforced by the clock, 
that created abstract time and led men to eat, not when they 
were hungry, but when it was Òtime  to eat.” Lewis Mumford 
makes a telling observation when he says that the abstract