Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

This passage occurs in the preface, where Arendt describes the moment after the unexpected fall of France to the Nazis in 1940. European writers and intellectuals—“they who as a matter of course had never participated in the official business of the Third Republic”—were suddenly “sucked into politics as though with the force of a vacuum,” into a world where word and deed were inseparable. Arendt argues that this created a public intellectual realm that, only a handful of years later, would collapse as they all went back to their private careers. Yet those who participated remembered a “treasure,” one where “he who ‘joined the Resistance, found himself.’ ” The treasure was nothing less than a sense of traction interrupting a life of petty careerism, a time in which one’s actions meant something different—meant something at all. Arendt writes that, in those years, these writers and intellectuals were “visited for the first time in their lives by an apparition of freedom…because they had become ‘challengers,’ had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore, without knowing or even noticing it, had begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear.”