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By Root 762 0

we can look to the Long Now Foundation, a Bay Area-based group whose mission is to foster thinking on a 10,000-year time horizon. Established in 1996 (or, as the group puts it, 01996, the leading zero having been added “to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years”), Long Now is laboring on two flagship projects—first, an ultra-accurate clock, to be built on a Nevada mountain, which will keep perfect time for at least ten millennia; and second, the Rosetta Project, designed to collect a permanent and exhaustive record of all 2,300 existing human languages, before any more of them die out. Danny Hillis, the group’s cofounder, uses a vivid historical example to demonstrate how long-term thinking can work. “I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford,” he wrote in a 1995 Wired essay about the clock project. He went on:

Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a hundred years from now?

For consumers of art and culture, one simple way to sift out ephemerality is “time-shifting”—i.e., delaying one’s experience of a cultural product long enough that any undue hype surrounding it has dissipated. In 2005, I came across an especially delightful example of time-shifting firsthand, when I told a new acquaintance what magazine I worked for. It was his favorite magazine, he replied with some excitement; indeed it was the only magazine he allowed himself to read. In fact, his devotion was such that he never missed a single page of any issue. Time being lamentably short, however, he was unable to get through an issue every month. And so he had devised a system: he kept his issues of the magazine sequentially on the shelf of his closet, adding each new issue to the right side while continuing to read the old copies in order from the left side.

What issue are you reading now? I asked him.

“Sometime in 1998,” he said.

This, I realized, was the highest compliment he could possibly have paid to my magazine—if not to me personally, seeing as how I had not even been hired until 2000. He was picking up seven-year-old issues of a periodical and finding them relevant enough to read. If you love something, set it free, the old adage goes, on the principle that the object of requited affection will inevitably return. Time-shifting poses a sort of corollary for art: If you want to see whether something is great, leave it on a shelf for seven days, or seven years, or seventy. Technology, in this regard, can become a friend instead of a foe. TiVo permits one to put off television shows until one is ready to watch them. Netflix allows one to forgo movies in the theater and instead wait for the best on DVD. Amazon’s formidable collection of small used-book sellers allows us to buy old and even out-of-print books as easily as buying new. If we cannot hope to overcome the pull of the now, we can at least attempt, as best we can, to see it alongside the then.

More generally: we must become judicious controllers of our own contexts, making careful and self-reflective choices about what we read, watch, consume. This is especially paramount for those of us who want not merely to enjoy art and culture but to create our own. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche drew a distinction between two ancient schools of thought, the Stoic and the Epicurean, in terms of their opposite solutions to the filtering of life experience. “The Epicurean,” he wrote, “selects the situation, the persons, and even the events that suit his extremely irritable intellectual constitution; he gives up all others, which means almost everything, because they would be too strong and heavy for him to digest. The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without