content-documents/house-oversight-nov/22/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018362.md

---
title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018362)"
source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)"
sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein"
date: "2026-01-01"
category: "House Oversight"
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engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)"
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processing. They had lived this. Enabled it. Profited from it. If there was ever a
group you might hope to take aside, pull into a quiet room and ask gently What are
the really networks for, anyway? this would be it.
The act of keeping time, of marking it, is embedded in the nature of any age. Our
lives are, after all, dictated by timetables: School schedules, the seasons, rush hour,
the burning candle of birth-love-marriage-death. Time, in the days before industry,
was measured by nature's schedule. How long it took a crop to mature. The
solstices. A beehive filling with honey. It was marked by moving tides and shifting
seasons, and it demanded a slowness, a personal presence on the shores, in the
oceans, atop the fields over generations. "Summer afternoon," the novelist Henry
James remarked in a précis of a slower age he felt passing away in 1895. "To me
those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." 180
Then, in the industrial revolution, time became money. Electric lights, for instance,
undid the restful distinction between night and day - and made 24-hour life and
manufacturing and economics possible and then, of course, inevitable. Movement
from countryside to city established a really new sense of what the German critic
Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, called tempo. "With each crossing of the street, with
the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up
a deep contrast with small town and rural life," he explained. "The technique of
metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all
activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule." 181 Punch
cards. Bus schedules. The forty hour work week. Our education, our manufacturing,
our markets and our lives all began to run on timetables. They had to, or the whole
project of industry would collapse. "Summer Afternoon" became a time to work.
Simmel worried, for instance, over the diffusion of pocket watches. To carry one was
like looking at a constantly draining bank account.
This sense of humans reduced to cogs - churned, run, disposed of on a schedule not
their own - unnerved the residents of that first mechanical age. Cities had been the
very first sorts of tight-packed networks; industrial cities ratcheted this further still.
They succeeded and failed by the degree to which they geared themselves and their
citizens to machine speed. When the Austrian novelist Robert Musil began The Man
Without Qualities, his classic story of the era, with the flattening of a Viennese citizen
by a speeding delivery truck, he meant to point out how urban speed and urban life
(and urban death) had become inseparable. And also the mismatch between the
weak breaks of the age and it's acceleration. The book is alive with that pre-accident
slipping sensation you may have had: You are pressing hard on the brakes of the car;
you are going to hit something anyhow. "Cities can be recognized by their pace just
as people can by their walk," Musil wrote in a line that any modern New Yorker or
180 "Summer afternoon": Edith Wharton, A Backwards Glance, (New York: D.
Appleton-Century, 1934) See chapter 10 for her tale of an afternoon with James.
181 "With each crossing": Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds. The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford and
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 11
130
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