Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkemam’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals falls into the category of books which use major philosophic issues to deal with everyday matters. Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel is the Ur example of this genre. For example, Burkeman quotes Heidegger to deal with the matter of disposable time. After all Sein Und Zeit is Heidegger’s famed work. “What does it mean for a human being to be?” Burkeman remarks, paraphrasing Heidegger. “His answer is that our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time.” Here is a quote from Joseph B. Soloveitchick, the famous Jewish scholar and rabbi from his classic The Lonely Man of Faith: “Why am I beset by this feeling of loneliness and being unwanted? Is it the Kierkegaardian anguish—an ontological fear nurtured by the awareness of nonbeing threatening one’s existence…? Soloveitchik and Heidegger make strange bedfellows particularly because the German philosopher was notoriously a Nazi sympathizer. Here is Burkemam again on Heidegger: “The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world…is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all—the fact there is anything rather than nothing” Sartre, of course, wrote L’etre et le neant, but he was talking about existential rather than temporal nothingness. To invoke an overused phrase, “life is not a rehearsal.” Heidegger believed that those who avoided the awareness of death were living an inauthentic existence. Henry Adams wife Clover said about Henry James: “He chewed more than he bit off.” Can one savor these ideas without attempting to unravel them?

Read "Gone Fishing" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope

and listen to "Our Day Will Come"(1963) by Ruby & The Romantics