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06786_Field_TCUM T351.txt
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1996-04-10
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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