阅读理解
If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads. Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely. 【R1】__________ The railroads needed standardized time; as a result, the technology of train travel shaped the way everyone gets up, eats, goes to sleep, and calculates age. 【R2】__________One earth, one metronome. Or, as a character in Maud Casey's novel "The Man Who Walked Away" put it, "The universal day was established, like the slicing of a pie." 【R3】__________ The day is not a pie but a vapor, a tenuous notion. Standardized time's regulatory powers are fading. We seem to have entered the Age of Relativity, wherein we finally experience time as Einstein imagined it, contracting and expanding relative to the velocities of observers. Quantum mechanics has long posited that the universe is made of space, not time. Culture, with its usual sensitivity, is responding to the new atemporality by melting down and recasting clocks for audiences now accustomed to inhabiting several different kinds of time simultaneously. Communication can be as fast as the sending of an emoji, and an art piece can take twenty-four hours to "see," or even longer—one recent example is an enormous Sphinx made of sugar, which was intended, as the author said, to be "very temporary," to dissolve, eroded by time. One could see time acting upon it as the weeks passed, which was part of its appeal. All temporal bets are off, including, given climate change, the seasons. 【R4】__________ However, if standardized time was a fiction more or less driven by capitalism, it might be possible that atemporality is a fiction more or less driven by capitalism, as well. 【R5】__________But we do sleep, and we still die, putting an end to our shopping. All beings are, in fact, temporary, composed of cells that grow, age, and perish. The Internet may not be subject to time, but we are, and so is everything around us. As the Japanese Zen Master Dogen said, in the thirteenth century, "all being is time." [A] Imagine the world as a whole, ticking reliably, with reliable deviations, according to the beat of one central clock in a physical location. [B] By setting all clocks with standardized deviations from a central meridian, such as Greenwich Mean Time—in 1855 in Britain, in 1883 in the United States—train schedules could make sense nationally. [C] Railroad time coincided with the Industrial Revolution, with the division of labor and the rise of the machine, with the valorization of efficiency. Internet atemporality has coincided with globalization, with a vast market that never closes; its ideal citizen-consumer would never sleep and never cease to spend. [D] It's still one earth, but it is now subtended by a layer of highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective unconscious wherein past, present, and future occupy one unmediated plane. [E] The Internet, however, doesn't need standardized time to function. It can use it in forecasting delivery times of packages, say, or in time-stamping messages, and so on, but it also does much of what it does in a state of atemporality. [F] At the same time, as it were, there is no real time on Facebook; that eternal Now might as well also be Never. [G] There are more clocks than ever—clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second—but they all seem to matter less.