We’re enslaved to many old, discredited paradigms. Take time, for instance. Do you remember those school physics classes where we were taught the rules of the Newtonian universe? The letter “t” represented time, and a few simple equations showed its relationship to space. The equations aren’t exactly nonsense. They are useful for calculating simple things. They presume that the cosmos is a machine. But they do not accurately describe the most fundamental nature of the world because, quite simply and wholly obviously to those who know how to look, the cosmos is not a machine. Einstein told us this. The “t”, he said, could not be considered alone. It was bound up inextricably with space in an organic unity called “space-time”. Quantum physics has confirmed and riffed on this insight, giving a more satisfactory and resonant mythos to the scientific story.

Yet, at least in our economic and political lives (which, disastrously, are conflated more and more with our real lives) we cling to Newton’s clunking, superannuated model. We see the “t” as a discrete quantity that behaves in a linear way. It plods steadily and metronomically from the past to the future, but has no real present.

This sort of time can be measured easily. It can, just as in those Newtonian equations, be expressed in terms of other things. The common equation is that time is money. When we buy into the idea of the machine, what really happens is that the machine buys and sells us. The Newtonian machine that oversimplifies and reduces is a close relative of the economic machine that degrades and exploits. The dignity and complexity of real humans are as incompatible with the notion of Homo economicus as the simple Newtonian “t” is with the mystery of the real universe.

If we bother to think about it, we know that time does not really work in this straight and straightforward way. “Hasn’t time flown?”, we say. And “Can that really be the time?” It won’t be the time according to the old linear model. But we revert to that model to calculate our wages, and hence our worth; or our life expectancy, and hence our expectations.

Jenny Odell has bothered to think about this for us. The result is Saving Time, a scintillating and important meditation on the notion of time, the consequences of misunderstanding it and the hope that can spring from an understanding derived from embodiment and place and the flight of birds and the swing of tides and the fact that when you stand on a beach or a rock, you’re standing on crystallized time.

She builds imaginatively and poetically on the foundations laid down by Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution (1907). Bergson thought that our problems in perceiving the true nature of time came from imagining moments sitting alongside one another in space – like terraced houses or railway carriages. It’s better, he contended, to think of time as akin to biological evolution, in which (without any determinism) each moment is inherent in the last. Odell’s picture (with which Heraclitus would agree) is of lava flowing over relatively level ground. The leading edge of the flow is alive and dynamic, but its continuity with the past is obvious, and the past remains real and present. The aliveness and indeterminacy of the flow should make life exciting and hopeful. To inhabit consciously this type of time is to recognize the “fundamental uncertainty that lives at the heart of every single moment”. This also is where our agency lives. We have to live there to be free. And if we are free there is never any cause for despair.

The Greeks, of course, knew all this. They distinguished between flat, linear, Newtonian, “time is money” time (chronos) and kairos — Heraclitean flow-time, in which novelty can erupt out of history; which has room for crisis and epiphany. It is in kairos that a time can be opportune; in which a moment can be “seized”. “This book”, writes Odell, “was written in kairos for kairos.” I believe her. It reads that way.

Though the Greeks noted and pondered the distinction, they didn’t discover it. Kairos is our birthright, which we have sold for a mess of spreadsheets. It is our birthright because the clock-less natural world runs, trots, surges and evolves according to kairos rather than GMT, and we, when we are properly ourselves, are part of that natural world. Odell exhibits a graph showing the discrepancy between sundial time and clock time. Sun time and clock time rarely coincide. The sundial directly reflects the wobblingly elliptical career of the Earth. Its time represents something that’s really there. Clock time is a confection.

Nature, famously, has no straight lines, and we’ll live less chafingly if we bend with its voluptuous curves. Most people, left to themselves, adopt the true shapes of the world and embody those shapes in their minds. Tyson Yunkaporta, a member of the indigenous Apalech clan in Queensland, writes that “explaining Aboriginal notions of time is an exercise in futility as you can only describe it as ‘nonlinear’ in English … We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider travelling, thinking or talking in a straight line … The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.” Hours, minutes and days are abstractions. They have nothing to do with the seasons or the winds or the body. Odell looks in the mirror at the lines on her forehead that appeared during the pandemic — a time when many people aged faster, for biological clocks don’t tick regularly. Birds moult and leaves drop when the time is right, not when Google Calendar says so.

Why do we choose the artificial over the real and the abstract over the concrete, even when the choice makes us palpably less happy? Odell doesn’t address the issue directly here. Perhaps the most convincing answer has been given by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021), in terms of the eclipse of the holism, context and wisdom of the right hemisphere by the narrow, nerdish focus of the usurping, grasping, manipulating left hemisphere.

Whatever the reason, chronos, after a gentle, promising adolescence ringing the bells to mark the monastic hours, entered into a diabolical coalition with profit and became monstrous. Clocks were packed alongside rawhide whips on colonialist ships. Chronos metastasized throughout the world, eventually aided and abetted by the Protestant work ethic – which continues to believe in chronos long after chronotic work has ceased to be godly or ennobling. Chronos drove out kairos wherever it found it. Kairos couldn’t be measured, bought, sold or controlled, and therefore was the enemy.

Odell’s previous book, How to Do Nothing (2019) was a broadside against neoliberalism. In Saving Time she returns doughtily to the fray. She introduces us to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the original time and motion man, and a high priest of chronos. As a youth he manically analysed his movements and counted his own steps. His psychopathology soon became standard industrial practice. He’d have been delighted to watch the Amazon worker in Kentucky walking up to sixteen miles a day to meet her targets, a GPS-enabled scanner tracking her movements and telling her constantly how many seconds she has left for the task in hand. He’d have applauded Cognizant, the content moderation company used by Facebook, whose moderators view videos, some of which are vile, and have nine minutes a day of “wellness” time to deal with the trauma. Workers have to use a browser extension every time they go to the bathroom. Odell tells of one employee there who was ill at work, but had used up all her bathroom breaks. A manager brought her a waste bin so that she could vomit without leaving her workstation. That’s impressive obedience to the ruling algorithm and the rule of chronos.

Humans, if they’re behaving humanly, don’t behave algorithmically, but they increasingly have to compete and interact with robots that do. The result is dehumanization, and there’s a pandemic of dehumanization that makes Covid look like a picnic.

There’s no avoiding the politics. The modern hegemony of chronos is about profit, and hence about control. When we see a clock Odell urges us to ask: “who is timing whom?” It’s a revolutionary question.

But there is a more fundamental and repercussive question. What has happened to the way that we attend to the world? The sort of attention ordained by chronos does not allow anything conducive to human thriving to be noticed, let alone celebrated.

At the end of the book Odell feels her heartbeats as words: “They were saying what they always had: Again. Again. Again”. I’d paraphrase that as “Possibility. Possibility. Possibility”. “Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention.” This might sound like pretentious new-age drivel. In fact it’s brutally practical. There’s no more urgent entreaty for individuals or society. The urgency must be experienced now — both in quotidian, rapacious chronos and in succulent, bounteous kairos, while time of whatever species still has some valency.

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. His next book, Cry of the Wild, will be published in May