In Praise of Slow Read online

  My own life fits the pattern. Children are a lot of work, and the only way to survive parenthood is to downsize your diary. But I find this hard. I want to have it all. So instead of cutting back on my hobbies, I contrive to squeeze them into a schedule that is already bursting at the seams. After slipping off for an extra tennis game, I then spend the rest of the day rushing to catch up. I drive faster, walk faster and skip through the bedtime stories.

  Like everyone else, I look to technology to help me buy more time, and with it the chance to feel less hurried. But technology is a false friend. Even when it does save time, it often spoils the effect by generating a whole new set of duties and desires. When the washing machine arrived in the early twentieth century, it freed housewives from hours of knuckle-shredding toil. Then, over the years, as standards of hygiene rose, we started washing our clothes more often. Result: the overflowing laundry basket is as much a feature of the modern household as the pile of bills on the front doormat. Email is another example. On the plus side, it brings people together like never before. But ease of use has led to rampant overuse, with everyone clicking “send” at the drop of a hat. Each day, the information superhighway carries over five billion emails, many of them superfluous memos, rude jokes and spam. For most of us, the result is a daily hike up Email Mountain.

  With so much pressure on our time, even the most dedicated apostle of slowness finds it hard not to hurry. Take Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk who walked all the way to Britain from his native India in the 1960s and has since travelled much of the world on foot. Today, he lives in Devon, in southwestern England, where he publishes Resurgence, a bimonthly magazine that espouses many of the ideas dear to the Slow movement. I meet Kumar on a perfect summer evening in London’s Hyde Park. A small, lean figure in a linen suit, he walks serenely through the straining hordes of inline skaters, joggers and speed-walkers. We sit in the shade beneath a tree. Kumar removes his socks and shoes and sinks his well-travelled feet into the long grass. I ask him about time-sickness.

  “It is a Western disease to make time finite, and then to impose speed on all aspects of life,” he says. “My mother used to tell me: ‘When God made time he made plenty of it’—and she was right.”

  But your mother lived her whole life in rural India, I point out. Surely the pressure to speed up, to beat the clock, is irresistible in the modern world.

  “Yes, that is true to an extent. Living here, I too succumb to hurry, to speed. Sometimes there is no other way to meet the deadlines for the magazine. Living in the West, one constantly struggles not to be dominated by the clock.”

  An airplane rumbles plaintively overhead. Kumar glances at his watch. His next appointment, a book launch, is starting in fifteen minutes. “It’s time to go,” he says, with a weak smile. “I don’t want to be late.”

  Time-sickness can also be a symptom of a deeper, existential malaise. In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness. Kundera thinks that speed helps us block out the horror and barrenness of the modern world: “Our period is obsessed with the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered, that it is tired of itself, sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.”

  Others think speed is an escape not from life but from death. Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, has written perceptively on the modern cult of speed. When we meet over coffee, he steers the conversation away from rocket engines and broadband Internet. “Despite what people think, the discussion about speed is never really about the current state of technology. It goes much deeper than that, it goes back to the human desire for transcendence,” he says. “It’s hard to think about the fact that we’re going to die; it’s unpleasant, so we constantly seek ways to distract ourselves from the awareness of our own mortality. Speed, with the sensory rush it gives, is one strategy for distraction.”

  Like it or not, the human brain is hardwired for speed. We get a kick from the danger, the buzz, the thrilling, throbbing, heady surge of sensory input that comes from going fast. Speed triggers the release of two chemicals—epinephrine and norepinephrine—that also course through the body during sex. Kundera is right on the money when he talks about “the ecstasy of speed.”

  And not only do we enjoy going fast, we get used to it, we become “velocitized.” When we first drive onto a motorway, 70 miles per hour seems fast. Then, after a few minutes, it feels routine. Pull onto a slip road, brake to 30 mph and the lower speed seems teeth-gnashingly slow. Velocitization fuels a constant need for more speed. As we get used to 70 mph, we are tempted to lean a little harder on the accelerator, to push the speedometer up to 80 mph or 90 mph or higher. In 1899, a Belgian engineer built the first car designed purely to break speed records. Shaped like a torpedo, and propelled by two electric motors, the vehicle bore a name that summed up our yearning to go faster and faster: La Jamais Contente—Never Happy.

  The curse of velocitization reaches beyond the open road. Take Web surfing. We are never happy with the speed of our Internet connection. When I first began surfing the Net with a broadband modem, it seemed lightning fast. Now it feels run-of-the-mill, even a little sluggish. When a page fails to load instantly, I lose patience. Even a delay of two or three seconds is enough to make me click the mouse to hurry things along. The only answer seems to be a faster connection.

  As we go on accelerating, our relationship with time grows ever more fraught and dysfunctional. Any medical textbook will tell you that a microscopic obsession with detail is a classic symptom of neurosis. The relentless drive to shave time into ever smaller pieces—it takes five hundred million nanoseconds to snap your fingers, by the way—makes us more aware of its passage, more eager to make the most of it, more neurotic.

  The very nature of time seems to have changed, too. In the old days, the Bible taught that “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”—a time to be born, to die, to heal, to weep, to laugh, to love and so on. In Don Quixote, Cervantes noted that “Que no son todos los tiempos unos”—not all times are the same. In a 24/7 world, however, all time is the same: we pay bills on Saturday, shop on Sunday, take the laptop to bed, work through the night, tuck into all-day breakfasts. We mock the seasons by eating imported strawberries in the middle of winter and hot cross buns, once an Easter treat, all year round. With cellphones, Blackberrys, pagers and the Internet, everyone and everything is now permanently available.

  Some argue that a round-the-clock culture can make people feel less hurried by giving them the freedom to work and run errands whenever they want to. That is wishful thinking. Once the boundaries are swept away, competition, greed and fear encourage us to apply the time-is-money principle to every single moment of the day and night. That is why even sleep is no longer a haven from haste. Millions study for exams, learn foreign languages and brush up on management techniques by listening to tapes while they doze. On the Sleep Learning website, the assault on what used to be the one time when we could slow down without feeling guilty is dressed up as an exciting opportunity for self-improvement: “Your non-waking hours—one third of your life—are now non-productive. Tap this huge potential for advancing your career, health and happiness!”

  So great is our neurosis about time that we have invented a new kind of therapist to help us deal with it. Enter the time management gurus. Some of their advice, proffered in countless books and seminars, makes sense. Many recommend doing fewer things in order to do them better, a core tenet of the Slow philosophy. Yet most fail to attack the root cause of our malaise: the obsession with saving time. Instead, they indulge it. In 2000, David Cottrell and Mark Layton published 175 Ways to Get More Done in Less Time. Written in breathless, get-on-with-it prose, the book is a manual for maximizing efficiency, for acceleration. Tip number 141 is simply: “Do Everything Faster
!”

  And in those three words, the authors neatly sum up what is wrong with the modern world. Think about it for a minute: Do Everything Faster. Does it really make sense to speed-read Proust, make love in half the time or cook every meal in the microwave? Surely not, but the fact that someone could write the words “Do Everything Faster” underlines just how far we have gone off the rails, and how urgently we need to rethink our whole way of life.

  It is not too late to put things right. Even in the era of the one-minute bedtime story, there is an alternative to doing everything faster. And though it sounds like a paradox, the Slow movement is growing quickly.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SLOW IS BEAUTIFUL

  For fast-acting relief from stress, try slowing down.

  —LILY TOMLIN, AMERICAN ACTRESS AND COMEDIENNE

  WAGRAIN, A RESORT TOWN nestled deep in the Austrian Alps, moves at a slow pace. People come here to escape the hurly-burly of Salzburg and Vienna. In the summer, they hike the wooded trails and picnic beside mountain streams. When the snow falls, they ski through the forests, or down the steep, powdery slopes. Whatever the season, the Alpine air fills the lungs with the promise of a good night’s sleep back in the chalet.

  Once a year, though, this small town does more than just live at a slow pace. It becomes a launch pad for the Slow philosophy. Every October, Wagrain hosts the annual conference of the Society for the Deceleration of Time.

  Based in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, and boasting a membership that stretches across central Europe, the Society is a leader in the Slow movement. Its more than one thousand members are foot soldiers in the war against the cult of doing everything faster. In daily life, that means slowing down when it makes sense to do so. If a Society member is a doctor, he might insist on taking more time to chat to his patients. A management consultant could refuse to answer work calls on the weekend. A designer might cycle to meetings instead of driving. The Decelerators use a German word—eigenzeit—to sum up their creed. Eigen means “own” and zeit means “time.” In other words, every living being, event, process or object has its own inherent time or pace, its own tempo giusto.

  As well as publishing earnest papers on man’s relationship with time, the Society stirs up debate with tongue-in-cheek publicity stunts. Members patrol city centres wearing sandwich boards emblazoned with the slogan “Please hurry up!” Not long ago, the Society called on the International Olympic Committee to award gold medals to the athletes with the slowest times.

  “Belonging to the Slow movement does not mean that you must always be slow—we take planes, too!—or that you must always be very serious and very philosophical, or that you want to spoil everybody else’s fun,” says Michaela Schmoczer, the Society’s very efficient secretary. “Seriousness is okay, but you don’t need to lose the humour.”

  With that in mind, the Decelerators regularly run “speed traps” in town centres. Using a stopwatch, they time pedestrians going about their daily business. People caught covering 50 metres in less than thirty-seven seconds are pulled over and asked to explain their haste. Their punishment is to walk the same 50 metres while steering a complicated turtle marionette along the pavement. “It is always a huge success,” says Jurgen Adam, a schoolteacher who ran a speed trap in the German city of Ulm. “Most people have not even thought about why they are going so fast. But once we get them talking about speed and time, they are very interested. They like the idea of slowing down. Some even return later in the day, asking to walk the turtle a second time. They find it so soothing.”

  At the Society’s annual conference in 2002, seventy members from Germany, Austria and Switzerland descended on Wagrain to spend three days putting the world to rights over wine and Wiener schnitzel. Dress is casual, as is the timekeeping. A slogan pinned up in the main meeting room speaks volumes: The beginning is when the time is right. Translation: many of the workshops start late. Thanks to a printing slip-up, a whole thirty-minute slot is missing from the Saturday program. When I point out the anomaly to a delegate, he looks perplexed. Then he shrugs, smiles and says: “Oh well. Easy come, easy go.”

  Don’t get the wrong idea. The Decelerators are not flaky relics from the hippie era. Far from it. They are the kind of concerned citizens you find at neighbourhood watch meetings around the world—lawyers, consultants, doctors, architects, teachers. Nevertheless, the conference does occasionally tip into farce. At one workshop, held in a hotel lobby, two shaggy philosophy students lead a discussion about the art of doing absolutely nothing. A dozen members convene about ten minutes after the official start time. They sit without speaking, shifting uncomfortably in their fold-up chairs. Only the distant whir of a vacuum cleaner, echoing up a nearby stairwell, disturbs the silence.

  Elsewhere in the hotel, though, others explore more pragmatic ways of slowing down. One entrepreneur gives a workshop on his blueprint for the world’s first Slow hotel. “Most vacations are so stressful nowadays,” explains Bernhard Wallmann, a large, middle-aged man with puppy-dog eyes. “It starts with the journey by plane or car, then you rush around seeing as many sights as possible. You check your email in an Internet café, you watch CNN or MTV on the hotel television. You use your mobile to check in with friends or colleagues back home. And then at the end you return more tired than when you left.” Tucked away in an Austrian national park, his three-hundred-bed Slow Hotel will be different. Guests will travel to a nearby village by steam train, and then on to the hotel by foot or in a horse-drawn carriage. All hurry-inducing technology—televisions, cellphones, laptops, Palm Pilots, cars—will be banned. Instead, guests will enjoy simple, Slow pleasures such as gardening, hiking, reading, yoga and spa treatments. Guest speakers will come to talk about time, speed and slowness. As Wallmann lays out his vision, some of the Decelerators balk. It’s too big, too elitist, too commercial, they cry. But Wallmann, who wears the polished black shoes of a man who means business, is undeterred. “There is a great hunger for slowness in the world now,” he tells me later, between mouthfuls of apple strudel. “I think the time is right for a hotel that really lets people slow down in every way.”

  Opting out of the culture of speed involves a leap of faith—and it is always easier to leap when you know others are leaping too. Erwin Heller, a property lawyer from Munich, tells me that meeting other members of the Society for the Deceleration of Time helped him take the plunge. “I felt that the constant acceleration of everything was bad, but when you are alone, you always suspect that you might be wrong, and that everybody else is right,” he says. “Knowing there are many other people thinking the same way, and even acting on it, has given me the confidence to slow down.”

  The Society members are not alone. Around the world, people are banding together into pro-Slow groups. More than seven hundred Japanese people now belong to the Sloth Club, which advocates less hurried, more environmentally friendly living. The group runs a café in Tokyo that serves organic food, stages candlelight concerts and sells T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the slogan “Slow is beautiful.” Tables are deliberately spaced farther apart than is normal in Japan, to encourage people to relax and linger. Thanks in part to the Sloth Club, deceleration is now hip in Japan. The nation’s advertisers use the English word “slow” to sell everything from cigarettes and holidays to apartment blocks. Admiration for the easygoing lifestyle of Mediterranean Europe is so widespread that one commentator talks of the “Latinization of the Japanese people.”

  In 2001, one of the Sloth Club’s founders, an anthropologist and environmental activist named Keibo Oiwa, published a survey of the various campaigns for slowness around the world. The book was called Slow is Beautiful, and is already into its twelfth print run. When I visit Oiwa at his office at the Meiji Gakuin University outside Tokyo, he is just back from a well-attended three-day workshop on slowness held by the Hyogo prefecture. “More and more people in Japan, especially young people, are realizing that it is okay to be slow,” he says. “For us that represents a total
sea change in attitudes.”

  On the other side of the Pacific, from its headquarters in San Francisco, the Long Now Foundation is adding to the groundswell. Its members warn that we are so busy sprinting to keep up with the daily grind that we seldom lift our gaze beyond the next deadline, the next set of quarterly figures. “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span,” they say. To make us slow down, to open our eyes to the long view and the big picture, the Foundation is building huge, intricate clocks that tick once a year and measure time over ten millennia. The first, a beautiful beast of bronze and steel, is already on display at the Science Museum in London, England. A second, much larger clock will eventually be carved into a limestone cliff near Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada.

  Many Long Now supporters work in the technology sector. Danny Hillis, who helped invent supercomputers, is on the board. Among the corporate donors are high-tech giants such as PeopleSoft, Autodesk and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Why are players from the fastest industry on earth backing an organization that promotes slowness? Because they, too, have realized that the cult of speed is out of hand.

  Today’s pro-Slow organizations belong to a tradition of resistance that started long before the industrial era. Even in the ancient world, our ancestors chafed against the tyranny of timekeeping. In 200 BC, the Roman playwright Plautus penned the following lament:

  The Gods confound the man who first found out

  How to distinguish the hours—confound him, too

  Who in this place set up a sundial

  To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

  Into small pieces!

  … I can’t (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave.