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In an edited extract from his introduction to The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms, Richard Powers explains why reading is the last refuge from the tyranny of time

Saturday August 14, 2004
The Guardian

We are living in the middle of an epidemic, one of those viruses that we’ve spread everywhere, almost without noticing. Yet we’ve adapted so well, it seems to have been with us for ever. We live in and around it, hardly even feeling its symptoms anymore. Like so many plagues, this one is iatrogenic, medicine-induced. Our cleanest instruments have produced an illness worse than the one they treat, infecting us with the contagion of real time .

In real time, each day’s every transaction is listed on the global exchange. Strangers with whom we are inextricably linked buy and sell futures on everything we do or fail to do. In real time, we are forever losing massive fortunes’ worth of squandered opportunity.

In real time, every second counts. Every minute must be maximised. Since we cannot stop the escaping moments, we have our machines give us the next best thing: two moments, crammed into one. Split screen. Multitasking. Mobile wireless voicemail message forwarding. RSS feeds. Picture-in-a-picture. We need miss nothing. In fact, we can’t.

In real time, every pleasure and pain plays out in public. Our most intimate fears are blogged and annotated with real-time communal comments a thousand times a day, retrievable any time from anywhere, at least for the time being. Everything we put our hand to is collectively evaluated, its Amazon-user stars continuously updated, in real time. We are kept in every loop, current on every development: film of the year, record of the month, personality of the day, scandal of the minute.

Real time guarantees we are always reachable, always up to date, always immersed in the unfolding world image, never alone, never outside the surging current of data intent on moving us ever farther downstream. In real time, we live in two minds, three tenses, and four continents at once, and buy back the bits lost in transit with frequent-flyer miles.

In short, we have grown so good at mastering time that nanoseconds now weigh heavy on our hands. And still, time stays, and we go.

Roberto Calasso: “Is this the prelude to extinction? Only to the superficial observer. For in the meantime all the powers of the cult of the gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading…”

Reading may be the last secretive behaviour that is neither pathological nor prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. The story strips its reader, holding her in a place time can’t reach. A book’s power lies in its ability to erase us, to expand or contract without limit, to circle inside itself without beginning or end, to defy our imaginary timetables and lay us bare to a more basic ticking. The pages we read are a nowhen, unfolding far outside the public arena. As long as we remain in them, now reveals itself to be the baldest of inventions.

How fast does real time flow? Clearly, one second per second. What is the rate of time of a book? Figuring that is like buying rupees on the black market: name your rate of exchange.

TE Lawrence: “I’m re-reading it with a slow deliberate carelessness.”

How long does a story last? I know a story where a game of cards lasts longer than a life sentence. I know a story where the Hundred Years War wraps itself up before the salad course.

Inside a book, we remember what we were born knowing: time exists not to use but to refuse, not to leverage but to lay waste to.

How long is an elevator ride? That all depends. What will you be reading on the way up?

Proust: “But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again, in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which seemed – had perhaps for long years seemed – to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated.”

We read to escape – if only briefly – the trap of real time, and then to return and recognise – if only briefly – the times we are trapped in. And for an instant, at least, time does not flow but is. You hit that last sentence and look up: Humbert Humbert is in the train seat in front of you. Charles Bovary beside you in the hospital waiting room. La Belle Dame sans Merci checking you out as the doors slide open and you step off at your floor.

© Richard Powers. This is an edited extract from Richard Powers’s introduction to The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms.