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The late Will Durant, the Book-of-the-Month Club's ubiquitous historian, once observed that "no man who is in a hurry is quite civilized." Time bestows value because objects reflect the hours they absorb: the hand-carved table, the handwritten letter, every piece of fine craftsmanship, every grace note. But now we have reached the stage at which not only are the luxuries of time disappearing -- for reading meaty novels, baking from scratch, learning fugues, traveling by sea rather than air, or by foot rather than wheel -- but the necessities of time are also out of reach. Family time. Mealtime. Even mourning time. In 1922 Emily Post instructed that the proper mourning period for a mature widow was three years. Fifty years later, Amy Vanderbilt urged that the bereaved be about their normal business within a week or so.
So how did America become so timeless? Those who can remember washing diapers or dialing phones may recall the silvery vision of a postindustrial age. Computers, satellites, robotics and other wizardries promised to make the American worker so much more efficient that income and GNP would rise while the workweek shrank. In 1967 testimony before a Senate subcommittee indicated that by 1985 people could be working just 22 hours a week or 27 weeks a year or could retire at 38. That would leave only the great challenge of finding a way to enjoy all that leisure.
And not only would the office be transformed. The American household soaked up microwaves, VCRs, blow dryers, mix 'n' eat, the computerized automobile that announces that all systems work and it is getting 23 miles to the gallon. The kitchen was streamlined with so much labor-saving gadgetry that meals could be prepared, served and cleaned up in less time than it took to boil an egg. Thus freed from household chores, Mom could head off to a committee meeting on social justice, while Dad chaired the men's-club clothing drive, and the kids went to bed at 10:30 after watching a PBS special on nuclear physics.
Sure enough, the computers are byting, the satellites spinning, the Cuisinarts whizzing, just as planned. Yet we are ever out of breath. "It is ironic," writes social theorist Jeremy Rifkin in Time Wars, "that in a culture so committed to saving time we feel increasingly deprived of the very thing we value." Since leisure is notoriously hard to define and harder to measure, sociologists disagree about just how much of it has disappeared. But they do agree that people feel more harried by their life-styles. "People's schedules are more ambitious," says John Robinson, who heads up the Americans' Use of Time project at the University of Maryland. "There just isn't enough time to fit in all the things one feels have to be done."
A poll for TIME and CNN by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman found this sense especially acute among women in two-income families: 73% of the women complain of having too little leisure, as do 51% of the men. Such figures produce no end of questions for sociologists, and everyone else, to stew over. Why do we work so hard? Why do we have so little time to spare? What does this do to us and our children? And what would we give up in order to live a little more peaceably?