Clippings

You’re wasting my time.
This gadget will save you hours.
I don’t have the time to give you.
How do you spend your time these days?
That flat tire cost me an hour.
I’ve invested a lot of time in her.
I don’t have enough time to spare for that.
You’re running out of time.
You need to budget your time.
Put aside some time for ping pong.
Is that worth your while?
Do you have much time left?
He’s living on borrowed time.
You don’t use your time profitably.
I lost a lot of time when I got sick.
Thank you for your time.

Time in our culture is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. Because of the way that the concept of work developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year. In our culture time is money in many ways: telephone message units, hourly wages, hotel room rates, yearly budgets, interest on loans, and paying your debt to society by “serving time.” These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures. They have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way. Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity — a limited resource, even money — we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.

time is money, time is a limited resource, and time is a valuable commodity are all metaphorical concepts. They are metaphorical since we are using our everyday experiences with money, limited resources, and valuable commodities to conceptualize time. This isn’t a necessary way for human beings to conceptualize time; it is tied to our culture. There are cultures where time is none of these things.

[We claim] that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. …on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig and spent most of his life near the court of Hanover in the service of the dukes, one of whom became King of England under the name of George I. He was even more catholic in his interests than the other great thinkers of his century; his philosophy embraced history, theology, linguistics, biology, geology, mathematics, diplomacy, and the art of inventing. He was one of the first after Pascal to invent a computing machine; he imagined steam engines, studied Chinese philosophy, and tried to promote the unity of Germany. The search for a universal method by which he could obtain knowledge, make inventions, and understand the essential unity of the universe was the mainspring of his life. The scientia generalis he tried to build had many aspects, and serveral of them led Leibniz to discoveriees in mathematics. His search for a characteristica generalis led to permutations, combinations, and symbolic logic; his search for a lingua universalis, in which all errors of thought would appear as computational errors, led not only to symbolic logic but also to many innovations in the mathematical notation. Leibniz was one of the greatest inventors of mathematical symbols. Few men have understood so well the unity of form and content. His invention of the calculus must be understod against this philosophical background; it was the result of his search for a lingua universalis of change and of motion in particular.

Genius though he was, Gödel was not a poster boy for mathematical sanity. Obsessed with ghosts and demons and an imagined heart ailment, he checked himself in and out of sanitariums many times in his adult life for treatment of depression and acute anxiety. He was always a finicky eater, but as he got older he ate less and less, refusing to take food from anyone but his wife Adele, fearing that other people were secretly trying to poison him. At sixty-four he weighed only eighty-six pounds. In the middle of 1977, when Adele was hospitalized for major surgery, he stopped eating altogether, and by the following January starved himself to death at the age of seventy-one. In his dying days he had serious doubts that his life’s work amounted to anything more than the discovery of another silly paradox à la Barber of Seville. He was plagued by Russell’s nightmare of future librarians trashing his work.

Graham had less success influencing Erdös’s health. “He badly needed a cataract operation,” Graham said. “I kept trying to persuade him to schedule it. But for years he refused, because he’d be laid up for a week, and he didn’t want to miss even seven days of working with mathematicians. He was afraid of being old and helpless and senile.” Like all of Erdös’s friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up — and wrote the $500 off as a business expense — Erdös said, “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathamatics back a month.” He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.