Temporal Bandwidth
We live thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know.
— Alan Jacobs
Productivity advice promises the ability to extend the capacity of an hour to encompass more work, more production, than it could otherwise hold. Our productivity hacks are like little time machines, allowing us to double up on each minute of the day. One might understandably expect this to make time feel as if it's slowing down, becoming denser, even holding more possibility.
However, the opposite is true for most people. Time flies. Or perhaps, time flees. We're harried and anxious, judging whether each minute is put to its proper (and most efficient) use.
According to historian Timothy Snyder, the influence of the digital world in our lives directs us to focus on how
questions, rather than why questions. He writes, “We phrase how questions in terms of ‘efficiency,' ‘maximization,' and ‘optimization.' The idiom of productivity is senseless in itself; it can be meaningful only when we know what we value." The answer to a how question can be squeezed into smaller and smaller increments of time with the help of digital processes. But the answers to why questions—questions of value and meaning—can't be.
The answers to why questions resist this shrinking by demanding our attention. Why questions help us think and act on a longer time scale, freeing us in small yet meaningful ways from the shackles of urgency.
Today, I wanted talk about the long term—the commitments, projects, and relationships we can work on when our temporal bandwidth widens. I'll get into all that soon, but first, I must introduce you to Rowan, the steerswoman.
The Steerswoman
Rosemary Kirstein published the first book, The Steerswoman, in her ongoing series in 1989. The second book came out in 1992, the third in 2003, and the fourth in 2004. Kirstein is working on the fifth and sixth books in the series. The series itself is a long-term project that resists the traditional schedule of speculative fiction publishing. But I want to focus on how time is treated within the series—because I've never encountered anything else like it.
The world of Kirstein's Steerswoman books seems, at first, to be premodern. There's no electricity, indoor plumbing, or mass communication. But certain characteristics mark it as oddly ahistorical—there's remarkable gender and racial equity, towns seem democratically organized, and there's very little presence of religion.
Central to this world is the institution of the steerswomen. A steerswoman is an intellectual adventurer, a highly trained and perceptive knowledge gatherer. She's an explorer, scientist, map-maker, and historian.
Steerswomen hold a respected position in this world. When someone asks a steerswoman a question, they trust she will answer truthfully. And when a steerswoman asks a question, she requires that she is answered truthfully, too. The consequence of refusing to answer or lying to a steerswoman is a lifetime ban from the cultural practice. The offender is no longer permitted to ask questions of any steerswoman.
At first, Kirstein's series reads like a fantasy. But it doesn't take long to suspect that something distinctly science fictional is going on beyond the perception of the main characters. What the steerswomen and common folk refer to as magic is, in Arthur C. Clarke's words, “sufficiently advanced technology."
The story takes on a sort of dual ontology of time and technology. It's told in a 3rd-person, limited perspective, almost exclusively focused on the steerswoman Rowan. So the narrative explicitly inhabits the world in which magic is the likeliest explanation for unexplained phenomena.
However, the reader quickly learns to read between the lines—magic lamp posts are electric, magic explosions are dynamite, magic communications are radio transmissions. The narrative implies a perspective that the reader understands as technological—in fact, far surpassing the technology familiar to us. But whatever glimpses the reader gets at the technological perspective are always refracted through Rowan's ontological lens.
The reader occupies the space between these ontologies. They already know—to an extent—the story that's taking place off the page. They've read Asimov, Le Guin, Herbert, Banks, Jemison, Leckie... They also know the story taking place on the page. They've read Tolkien, Martin, Jordan, Wells, McCaffrey, Bradley... What the reader doesn't know is what happens when these two stories come together.
Temporal Bandwidth
While I was reading the Steerswoman series, I also read Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs. In it, Jacobs argues for engaging with classic literature—even when it feels out of step with contemporary values. He borrows the concept of "temporal bandwidth" from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to explain:
“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago. . . . (Pynchon, quoted in Jacobs)
The Now of the steerswomen is incredibly wide. Their archives contain the daily logbooks of their order going back centuries. Current steerswomen keep their own logbooks knowing they'll be carefully maintained for centuries in the future. The steerswomen are rooted in history, giving them an appreciation for the way knowledge evolves and expands. They're also buoyed by the future, experiencing their own work as another step in that evolution and expansion.
Jacobs builds his argument for widening one's temporal bandwidth on mountains of social theory that describe the presentism of our contemporary experience. We exist, moment to moment, in a sliver of Now. Without careful and intentional consideration of our information environment, we're at the whims of the feed, the 24-hour news cycle, and the inbox. We feel harried and stuck simultaneously, which sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as a “frenetic standstill."
We view our daily work and life through a lens of constant change. It seems that what we do today might not matter tomorrow, let alone a week or a year from now. We don't complete projects or move forward with strategies because, consciously or not, we know the only thing we can be sure of is our sliver of Now.
Jacobs offers a deceptively simple solution: engage with times that are not our own. He's most interested in classic literature because he's a literature professor writing about the power of books. But other media also work. In On Freedom, Timothy Snyder, who I cited earlier, recommends biographies—personal histories that show how people act unpredictably within their cultural or political Now because they're connected to a wider world of values. Jenny Odell suggests using the present and our attention to it as a portal to wider Now, writing, “patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time."
Whether it's the crush of current events, the constant pull of endless feeds, the clamor of deadlines, or the urgent cries of unread emails and undone paperwork, cultivating a wider temporal bandwidth can help us keep things in perspective. But more than that, a lengthier Now helps us choose more effective and meaningful action. A more capacious temporal bandwidth gives us the breathing room to consider our values and what they demand of us.
Midway through the first book, Rowan is confronted with a choice. She can either pursue what is evidently dangerous knowledge and resign from the order. Or, she can pursue the usual knowledge of a steerswoman and maintain her identity. While resigning from the order feels counter to everything she believes in, she recognizes that pursuing the dangerous knowledge is really her only options. She explains:
“I can’t stand for it. I have to try to stop it, whatever it may take. Or at the very least, I have to know why.”
For Rowan, the why question widens not only her temporal bandwidth, but her moral bandwidth. It widens her “aperture to [the] world of values," in Snyder's words. The choice is clear—even if it was unthinkable moments before the question was asked. Making the choice deepens her relationship with the meaning she has given her life.
The first four books of the Steerswoman series cover six years. There are times, usually just a few days, when the action moves very quickly—enough to require a couple hundred pages. And sometimes the main characters must walk a month or more just to get to the next important location. Kirstein often “fast forwards" through these stretches. Between books, more than a year in the story's timeline can pass.
So many stories that feature magic, action, adventure, and, for that matter, advanced technology don't pay much attention to time. A lot happens—and we're never prompted to consider how much time has gone by. But Kirstein acknowledges the passage of time. She doesn't dwell on those long one-step-after-another stretches, but she does situate the reader in time whenever they occur.
She recognizes—and subtly directs readers to recognize—that discovery takes time. Understanding history and the natural world takes time. Politics and social change takes time. Archiving your personal knowledge—and the world's—takes time.
After that unthinkable, yet obvious, choice, Rowan reflects on the challenge she's taken up:
The one true concern she had was that she might die before the puzzle was solved, and that would be tragedy indeed.
To protect the hope of an answer: that was the goal, the duty and the pleasure. She felt it with more urgency than even the need of preserving her own life. To stay alive served the goal.
Rowan's puzzle is one of epic proportions. But I like the idea that we might be working on puzzles longer than our lifetimes too. And I like that protecting the hope of an answer is its own commitment—to achieve the satisfaction of resolution, we must act in ways that coax the answer out from behind the veil of time.
The antidote to our overwhelming presentism isn't simply to slow down but to widen our temporal bandwidth. Pick up an old book, listen to a history podcast, or even revisit your own work and experiences from ten or twenty years ago. Shift your attention to the values you hold dear. Ask why at least as often as you ask how.
Whatever strategy you choose, protect the hope of an answer to your most significant why questions. Time may still fly, but you'll be along for the ride.
