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The French writer, Charles Baudelaire, observed through his writings that modernity is the experience of life lived in fragments. This experience, the human experience, is even more fragmented today than it was when Baudelaire wrote in the mid-1800's.
In reviewing time management literature - something legitimately within the domain of Behavioral Economics, the counsel to "chunk" your time is frequent. Essentially, it is valuable to work in ‘blocks' of time that are sufficiently long enough to get through the beginning, middle, and end of getting some tasks done. Too short a time and your task doesn't get completed. Too long, and subsequent tasks won't.
Have you ever run a ‘defrag' on your computer? A similar process is occurring with this computer function as when people ‘chunk' their time. As a computer is used, it stores files in memory in different places on the hard drive. Through regular saving, deleting, and other computer processes, memory ‘clusters' that should be next to one another (related information) end up being stored in locations scattered all over your hard drive. The end result is much slower processing for a seriously fragmented computer. The ‘defragmentation' systematically rewrites those chunks of memory (from the same file, or similar type of file) to be as ‘grouped' as possible on the drive. This makes the computer's operation more efficient again.
There is a science to grouping things in chunks that improve efficiency because the items go together, but in enough different groups so each thing can fulfill its function. Incidentally, Baudelaire's full quote on this relates that the ‘flipside' of modernity is the eternal and the immutable - the things that are timeless and never change. In an age when a lot more classical standards were still strongly held and endorsed, Baudelaire actually defended the value of the fragmentation of experience, or, of what was ‘fleeting'. He lamented how painters of his day would often depict their subjects in Renaissance clothing as though it were somehow superior because it was from an earlier age. Indeed, in his essay "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863), he emphasises that the immutable is precisely often best found in the very unique expressions of one's own day and age. In his time, this might have been the Impressionist's paintings, or the sculptures of Rodin - or Thomas Edison's irrepressible ingenuity. In our times, this might be texting a friend, or a dissuading a telemarketer, or figuring out what ‘krunking' is. It can be in the here-today, gone-tomorrow stuff that the timeless is most delicately and compellingly depicted, even just for a moment.
So, just when you are longing for some integration, something eternal and immutable, perhaps the answer may be to find it in the timelessness of the present moment, the place you are, the faces you can see, however things may happen to be grouped or fragmented for you today.
"Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected." - Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", 1863
(English quote retrieved March 9, 2011, from Great-Quotes.com)
