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In an early episode of Camus’s The Plague (1947), Tarrou, one of the last victims of an epidemic in the Algerian city of Oran, writes the following musings in his diary:   Query: How to contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat   The proposition, of course, is absurd: the solution to the problem of wasting time is to waste time deliberately It is not what we do with our time that matters, Tarrou suggests, but rather that we experience the full measure of the time that passes – and furthermore that such awareness is only possible through acts that are otherwise shorn of purpose   I thought of this passage when I first went to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a monumental video installation that stitches together twenty-four hours’ worth of clips from film and television history, selected and ordered according to the time displayed or mentioned in any given scene These clips are also synced with real time, such that the scenes being played at, say, 3:26 pm all take place at 3:26 pm in their fictional universes Early-morning visitors to The Clock (which is being screened at the Tate Modern until 20 January) will be greeted by shot after shot of blaring alarm clocks Come midday, the actors start laying aside whatever drama they were embroiled in and sit down to lunch, as though some kind of cross-cinematic break has been called   When we are made constantly aware of the passage of each second, even a quarter of an hour can seem like an eternity (It’s enough time for Robert De Niro to get a haircut in-between appearing in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver) Yet this does not mean that watching The Clock