"An Intimate History of Humanity"

<Japan, revisited:>

• Chinese, the Japanese scholars' equivalent of the Europeans ' Latin.
• In (10th century Japan), it was shameful for an aristocratic woman to be dependent financially on her husband. She did not move in to live with him on marriage; each kept their own home.
• Even naked teeth were horrible, and were dyed black to conceal them.
• Their only solution was to say that it was very sad, and that it was very elegant to be able to recognise the beauty and the sadness of the world at the same time.
  
• the traditional Japanese solution for despair, which is to turn it into an aesthetic experience, to find beauty only in what is impermanent, to insist that unless beauty and love were fragile and perishable, they would not be beautiful.
  

<On time:>

• The ancient Chinese idea that frequent sexual intercourse helps one to live for a much longer time was still being propagated by prostitutes in eighteenth-century London, who used to accost customers with the words 'Sir, may I wind your watch for you?'
• The modern idea of time... includes a new sense that... time means change, and so insecurity. Humans welcomed the clock's regular tick, its unalterable habits, its tyranny, because it consoled them for this new insecurity. It was a tyranny which began as a liberation, as so many other tyrannies have.
  
• The Lilliputians observed two centuries ago that Gulliver's God was his watch, and that 'he seldom did anything without consulting it and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life'.
• Rabelais protested, 'Never will I subject myself to the hours; the hours are made for man and not man for the hours.'... 'I treat mine like stirrups, which I shorten or lengthen as I please.'
• There is a new sensitivity to the texture of time, to what makes it flow smoothly, agreeably, sensuously.
• The Saturday holiday was invented by manufacturers to eliminate this irregularity from their factories... A long war between the supporters and the enemies of Saint Monday ended with a divorce between work and leisure.
  

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