The Time of My Life (28 page)

Some of us don't want to give up the old ways. At the minibank of InterFirst where I make my deposits and cash my checks, the customers may choose between doing business with one of the three human tellers or one of three electronic machines. Often the line at the tellers' windows is ten yards long, while the machines are idle, blinking their cold little computer instructions to no one. Lately, however, many of the people in the line are glancing at wristwatches.

“If everything's done so quickly,” said my friend with the new watch, “why do we run out of time?”

“Time,” wrote Marcus Aurelius two thousand years ago, “is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away, too.”

And the river runs faster now than it used to, and we're less sure we know where it's going.

February, 1983