Book cover of Time: Big Ideas, Small Books

Book description

Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series

Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Time as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

During the short walk that entered literary history, Sigmund Freud met Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet who experienced the terror of mortality and felt eerily that everything human is ultimately worthless. Not really, Freud answered.

The mortality of nature and humans–the end of the beloved human face–gives them their ultimate meaning. It is because we know that everything that exists will be gone one day, which is why we cherish them. I read about it for the first time in this book. It is written with a very mild and careful hand, describing all things worthy of living. 

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German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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