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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.

1. Spanish cookies. They’re round, have a hole in the middle, and come in chocolate and vanilla. Available in European groceries.

2. In the movie Cronaca di un Amore (1950) by Michelangelo Antonioni, a woman holding a poodle remarks, “We get all sorts of people in our hotel. Filipinos, Indians…they all speak to her” (the dog).

3. “All I’m saying is, we stay local…but we live global. You get a hankering for the blood of a 15-year-old Filipina and she’s here the next day, express air.” – A yuppie vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3.

There’s a comprehensive listing including Tom Waits songs and fiction by Thomas Pynchon, Paul Bowles, Jonathan Franzen etc in Manila Envelope 1, which will be reprinted next year.

The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(No, sweetie that’s Chuck Palahniuk.)

He’s a wonderful writer, and the books (My Name Is Red, White Castle, Snow) are spectacular, but a whiff of politics will follow this particular prize. Pamuk was tried for treason in his homeland for saying that the Turks committed genocide upon the Armenians. On the day that the prize was announced, the French parliament passed a law making it a crime to deny the genocide in Armenia.

But isn’t everything political anyway? Especially prizes.

I think that at 54 he’s a little young. Now that he’s been canonized, everyone will assume he’s on the verge of death.

Oh, and shouldn’t his translators share the prize or at least be acknowledged? I don’t think everyone in the Academy reads Turkish.

I always thought Gregory Rabassa should have a share in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s glory. (What, you all read him in Spanish?)

Interesting story from ex-publisher Jaime. He had a classmate at university named Rodrigo Garcia. One day Rodrigo’s father came to visit, and it was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He took his son’s friends to lunch. “He talked a bit about writing, called it a discipline. Many mornings he forced himself to the table, and he got the same pain in the stomach one gets during final exams in high school. It was not always a labor of love. He could not understand why everyone was always looking for “symbolism”—he just wrote about the way he remembered things, no deeper meaning much of the time.”

Rodrigo Garcia now directs for film and television, including episodes of The Sopranos.

The Sopranos IS the great  literature of our times.

Havaianas, Crocs, flip-flops, they’re all the same to me: tsinelas. I would not wear tsinelas outside the house unless they came with an invisible germ-repelling force field—do you know what sort of filth you’re stepping on each time you go out? Sewage bubbling up from underground, toxic sludge, loogies and other disgusting emanations. To say nothing of microorganisms. Tsinelas are for two things: to wear in the shower, and to kill cockroaches.

Tsinelas are the only reliable cockroach-termination weapon. The most advanced insecticides cannot be trusted: they only lead to future generations of ipis immune to bug spray, plus they stink up your house and  probably have terrible side effects on the health of your pets and humans. Would you eat pesticide-laced vegetables (You probably already have)? You think you’ve annihilated the cockroaches, but the repulsive little monsters are only playing dead!

The only way to guarantee that the ipis is dead, extinct, bereft of life, an ex-ipis, is to whack it so hard with a tsinelas that its insides come out. Or to squish it with a tsinelas until it oozes. (And then disinfect your floor.) Remember: cockroaches can survive without their heads, so decapitation is not enough. Bear in mind that they can survive a nuclear holocaust. They must be terminated with extreme prejudice. Now pick up that tsinelas.

He dictates it to a guy from the ATP so it’s most probably edited, but it still sounds like him.

“There was so much traffic as always today in Moscow. I think that 90% of the people do not know where they are driving or the reason. How can this country function like that? There is always traffic. Who is working? It is just like in Italy, the most amazing country apart from Russia. People never work there, they are always eating or fixing their hair. But I guess the most talented people do not need to work and I think that the Italians are the most talented people in the world apart from the Russians…”

The Fed also blogs but is too damn nice.

“The country was on the slide, in the mire, had teetered on the brink of the crater so long no one suffered from vertigo any more. They were a nation as blasé as steeplejacks and as irresponsible as crows. Three hundred years in a Spanish convent and fifty years in Hollywood had not proved an ideal apprenticeship for the technological exigencies of the modern Asia. That witticism was a world-class coinage, about the only first-rate thing the nation had ever inspired—one or two pugilists and all the entertainers apart—Boyet would think in gloomy moments. A more vulgar way of putting it would be that he found himself the citizen of a country that had been gang-raped by Dagoes for coming on four centuries and then put on the Yankee titty, or worse, for half the modern one.” – Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo

“Randy has gotten into the habit of reaching Intramuros by cutting through Rizal Park. This is not a direct route. The direct route passes over a no-man’s land, a vast dangerous intersection lined with squatters’ huts (it is dangerous because of the cars, not the squatters). If you go through the bark, on the other hand, you only have to brush off a lot of whores. But Randy’s gotten good at that. The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day, and they have given him up as a maniac. He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain.” – Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

“The eyes that blink back at you are puffy and red from weeping, but aside from that, your reflection reveals nothing untoward beyond the usual surprise at your Philippine demeanor. In all these years, you still have not gotten used to it. Thanks to your mother, who was mostly Welsh, you managed to avoid growing one of those flat-bridged noses that cause all Philippine women to look like tomboys, even those with truckloads of black lace bras and two thousand pairs of high-heeled shoes. Your crisp little nose is your mother’s gift, but everything else—your skin, your hair, your eyes, and mouth—came over on the gene boat from Manila Bay.” – Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins

“The nameplates above the windshields had been one of the last revelations. Extraordinary that he could have known ‘Dragon Punch Lady’ ran the length of Edsa, or ‘Future Shock’ ran from Makati to Bicutan, but that he’d never wondered who the dragon punch lady might be, or what shock the future had in store. Extraordinary to live in a country that teemed with carefully thought-out messages, brightly emblazoned on huge plastic strips, that almost nobody ever bothered to read. Maybe this was why the owner of ‘My Secret Lover’ felt so confident about letting his secret out.” – The Tesseract by Alex Garland