The principal mode of our epoch isn’t business, but busyness. It’s to realize with a start in the middle of the day that we don’t have enough time on our hands. This has little do with apprehensions of mortality; those apprehensions and their ancient, poetic intimations have never before seemed so containable and, in the end, literary. Our anxieties have to do with our management of the day, the increasingly compressed portions of which it’s constituted.

To not be busy is, in a sense, to be superfluous. Which is why it’s so difficult to encounter people who aren’t constrained for time, or to come upon an actual day in which you’re entirely ‘free’. What makes us — not keeps us, but makes us — busy? In the answer to this question lies, you suspect, the key to its obverse, the near-unnegotiable query: why are we superfluous? As to what keeps us busy, the answer is simple, if long: jobs, business lunches, post-lunch coffees, checking email, filling cheques, investments, telephone conversations, loans, planned and unplanned expenditure, the pursuit, for some, of extra-marital enthusiasms, the pursuit, for others, of a client, the purchase of a new car, a visit to the cinema, selling a property, a trip to the hospital, the education of our children and the welfare of older relatives.

In what way, though, is time at a greater premium now than it was a hundred years ago, when it was not unusual for people to die at the age of 30 or 40? To review the projects that Derozio and Kaliprasanna Singha had taken up and completed in different periods in our own 19th century, before their death at the age of 22 and 30 respectively, is chastening. To look back at what Henry James — inadvertently bequeathed, unlike many of his characters, with a long life — wrote only in the last three decades of that century is to confront bewildering effort and profusion. As it is to think of D H Lawrence’s dense and restive bibliography, a list of poems, stories, novels, essays, and travelogues (not to mention letters) he undertook and completed before he turned 45, dying when he was about a year younger than I am now. Interesting, also, to (closer to today) remind ourselves of what Naipaul had written by the time he was 30. Were these people busy? There is hardly a mention of the word. Even in letters and diaries (and it’s in our conversations with friends and acquaintances, and while thinking aloud, that we use the term: “I’m sorry, I’ve been very busy”; “She must be busy now”), where there is mention of frustration and exhaustion, there’s almost no consciousness, or invocation, of busyness. The word occurs, almost always with a pedagogical mock-solemnity, in Renaissance poetry, but very rarely in the personal record of modernity. Many of the great works of the last two centuries, and of some of the writers I’ve mentioned, seem to carry within and around them a deceptive afflatus, an air of expansiveness and redundancy, of special opportunities for receptivity to the world. But, given their itineraries and output, where did these writers find time for anything other than work? Their oeuvres, their biographies, their health, are marked by continual, even frightful, toil. Are toil and labour, then, distinct from ‘busyness’? In what way?

And what, for that matter, are the signs of busyness? Often, they are brief messages. “Will call later”; or, characteristically, “In a meeting will call later”. What is a ‘meeting’? It’s one of the mysteries of the contemporary lifestyle; something that others do and define, something we interrupt or understand incompletely. Once, meetings had a ponderousness and weight; like journeys and appointments, they were planned and prepared for. Today, they are multifarious, and, in a simultaneously interconnected world, a form of deferral, a way of indicating a hierarchy of conversations. Until even the late Nineties, the main thing that kept people waiting was bureaucracy; in the first decade of the new millennium, it’s probably safe to say that bureaucracy has been replaced by the condition of being busy. Not Kafka’s door-keeper, but the unanswered email, the text message, hold us up, keep us outside. In the context of busyness, advertisement and information, two cardinal features of modernity and, then, globalization, are near-irrelevant, just as the bureaucratic injunction and the governmental edict are near-obsolete; the language it works through is the mirage of interpersonal contact, and the contentless but disarmingly direct message: “In a meeting will call later”. In Kafka’s parable of bureaucracy, The Trial, K realizes belatedly, and with a precipitous intuition of doom, that the door-keeper who he thought was appointed to keep everyone out had really been thus appointed “for him alone”; in our epoch of busyness, this is parodied utterly: the personal message is not meant only for us; it’s for everyone. “In a meeting…” is a default text, sent out by pressing a button.

Time shrinks with busyness, but so do objects. Our telephones turn into mobiles, our mobiles into Blackberries, our CD players into walkmans, our walkmans into iPods and who knows what spidery, weightless appurtenance. And, while certain technologies become obsolete, so, of course, do some pastimes For instance, it’s almost inconceivable to think now of sitting in front of a music system, listening, as we used to do when we were children; the archaic ritual of the family gathered round the hi-fi. In the West, but, more and more, here too, music — like business, like communicating with friends and clients — is what we do in cars, on buses and trains, in aeroplanes. Busy, we have to squeeze a great deal, music included, into the spaces that exist between locations; and a time may come when we are not only always busy, but when (and this is increasingly foreseeable) the distinction between the workplace and the site of recreation no longer holds — none of this happening in an extraordinary transformation, as in a science-fiction film, but in the humdrum, inalienable form in which most changes take place. With busyness, certain kinds of magic must cease to exist; for example, can children listening to music on the iPod believe in the necessity of tiny performers, as we once did? For the simulation of a concert to occur, with a miniature, make-believe, but compellingly credible orchestra intact, we must recreate some of the ceremonies of performance: of identifying a time when we’re doing nothing, of deferring to the source of music, of giving it, for a while, our attention. Is it possible to attend a concert when one is moving?