Two books I’ve been reading simultaneously couldn’t be more perfectly matched to each other. One is an exploration into the psychology of modern capitalism, the other a story about a little girl who follows a magic tortoise to save the world from some mysterious men in grey suits. The latter is Momo, by Michael Ende (author of The Neverending Story), and the other is The Fear Of Freedom by Erich Fromm.

“Time was so valuable that one felt one should never spend it for any purpose which was not useful.”
- Erich Fromm, The Fear Of Freedom, 1942

This book is incredible. It covers so much that I’ve been wanting to explore – pseudo thinking, freedom (what that means, rather than ‘how to be free’), capitalism, and time. Fromm doesn’t touch too much on time, but this quote set me off wanting to research the rise of time as we know it:

“Significant changes in the psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development in capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life towards the end of the Middle Ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop. Minutes became valuable; a symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nurnberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hour since the sixteenth century.”

Written in 1942, most of what Fromm describes in this book is alive and well and, with the exception of the Nazi party, thriving in 2009. The same can be said of the next book, written in 1973…

“Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, it seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time.”

There’s so much in this book that I could quote here. Entire chapters. I’m putting forward Chapter 6 ‘The Timesaving Bank’ for someone to read at the Time Travel Opportunists night at QUAD on 15th September (more about that soon), as it nails the stuff Fromm talks about in a way that only a book written for nine year olds could. I’ll be buying copies of this book for people, lending out my copy to anyone that wants it, and recommending it to everyone for a long long time…

“Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem an eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.
Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.”
- Michael Ende, Momo, 1973