In Praise of Slow Page 5

  The town’s so full of these confounded dials …

  As mechanical clocks spread across Europe, protest was never far behind. In 1304, Daffyd ap Gwvilyn, a Welsh bard, fumed: “Confusion to the black-faced clock by the side of the bank that awoke me! May its head, its tongue, its pair of ropes, and its wheels moulder; likewise its weights and dullard balls, its orifices, its hammer, its ducks quacking as if anticipating day and its ever restless works.”

  As timekeeping wormed its way into every corner of life, satirists poked fun at the European devotion to the clock. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the Lilliputians decide that Gulliver consults his watch so often that it must be his god.

  As industrialization gathered pace, so too did the backlash against clock-worship and the cult of speed. Many denounced the imposition of universal time as a form of slavery. In 1884, Charles Dudley Warner, an American editor and essayist, gave vent to the popular unease, echoing Plautus in the process: “The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.” Others complained that machines were making life too fast, too hectic, less humane. The Romantic movement of artists, writers and musicians that swept across Europe after 1770 was partly a reaction against the modern culture of hustle and bustle, a harking back to a lost idyllic era.

  Right through the Industrial Revolution, people sought ways to challenge, restrain or escape the accelerating pace of life. In 1776, the bookbinders of Paris called a strike to limit their working day to fourteen hours. Later, in the new factories, unions campaigned for more time off. The standard refrain was: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.” In a gesture that underscored the link between time and power, radical unionists smashed the clocks above the factory gates.

  In the United States, meanwhile, a group of intellectuals known as the Transcendentalists exalted the gentle simplicity of a life rooted in nature. One of their number, Henry David Thoreau, retired to a one-room cabin beside Walden Pond near Boston in 1845, from which he decried modern life as a treadmill of “infinite bustle … nothing but work, work, work.”

  In 1870, the British-based Arts and Crafts movement turned away from mass production to embrace the slow, meticulous handwork of the artisan. In cities across the industrial world, weary urbanites found solace in the cult of the rural idyll. Richard Jeffries made a career of writing novels and memoirs about England’s green and pleasant land, while Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich in Germany, Jean-Francois Millet in France and John Constable in England filled their canvases with soothing country scenes. The urban desire to spend a little time resting and recharging the batteries in Arcadia helped bring about the emergence of modern tourism. By 1845, there were more tourists than sheep in Britain’s Lake District.

  In the late nineteenth century, physicians and psychiatrists began calling attention to the deleterious effects of speed. George Beard got the ball rolling in 1881 with American Nervousness, which blamed fast living for everything from neuralgia to tooth decay and hair loss. Beard argued that the modern obsession with punctuality, with making every second count, made everyone feel that “a delay of a few minutes might destroy the hopes of a lifetime.”

  Three years later, Sir James Crichton-Browne blamed the high tempo of modern life for the sharp rise in the number of deaths in England from kidney failure, heart disease and cancer. In 1901, John Girdner coined the term “newyorkitis” to describe an illness whose symptoms included edginess, quick movements and impulsiveness. A year later, a Frenchman named Gabriel Hanotaux prefigured modern environmentalism by warning that the reckless pursuit of speed was hastening the depletion of the world’s coal reserves: “We are burning our way during our stay in order to travel through more rapidly.”

  Some of the fears articulated by the early critics of speed were patently absurd. Doctors claimed that passengers travelling on steam trains would be crushed by the pressure, or that the mere sight of a speeding locomotive would drive onlookers insane. When bicycles first became popular in the 1890s, some feared that riding into the wind at high speed would cause permanent disfigurement, or “bicycle face.” Moralists warned that bikes would corrupt the young by enabling them to enjoy romantic trysts far from the prying eyes of their guardians. However risible these misgivings turned out to be, it was nevertheless clear by the end of the nineteenth century that speed really did take a toll. Thousands were dying every year in accidents involving the new vessels of velocity—bicycles, cars, buses, trams, trains, steamships.

  As the pace of life accelerated, many spoke out against the dehumanizing effects of speed. Octave Mirabeau, a French writer, observed in 1908, “(Our) thoughts, feelings, and loves are a whirlwind. Everywhere life is rushing insanely like a cavalry charge.… Everything around a man jumps, dances, gallops in a movement out of phase with his own.” Through the twentieth century, resistance to the cult of speed grew, and began to coalesce into broad social movements. The counterculture earthquake of the 1960s inspired millions to slow down and live more simply. A similar philosophy gave birth to the Voluntary Simplicity movement. In the late 1980s, the New York-based Trends Research Institute identified a phenomenon known as downshifting, which means swapping a high-pressure, high-earning, high-tempo lifestyle for a more relaxed, less consumerist existence. Unlike decelerators from the hippie generation, downshifters are driven less by political or environmental scruples than by the desire to lead more rewarding lives. They are willing to forgo money in return for time and slowness. Datamonitor, a London-based market research firm, expects the number of downshifters in Europe to rise from twelve million in 2002 to over sixteen million by 2007.

  These days, many people are seeking refuge from speed in the safe harbour of spirituality. While mainstream Christian churches face dwindling congregations, their evangelical rivals are thriving. Buddhism is booming across the West, as are bookstores, chat rooms and healing centres dedicated to the eclectic, metaphysical doctrines of New Ageism. All of this makes sense at a time when people crave slowness. The spirit, by its very nature, is Slow. No matter how hard you try, you cannot accelerate enlightenment. Every religion teaches the need to slow down in order to connect with the self, with others and with a higher force. In Psalm 46, the Bible says: “Be still then, and know that I am God.”

  In the early twentieth century, Christian and Jewish clerics lent moral weight to the campaign for a shorter workweek, arguing that workers needed more time off in order to nourish their souls. Today, the same plea for slowness is once again emanating from pulpits around the world. A Google search turns up scores of sermons railing against the demon speed. In February 2002, at the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York, Reverend Gary James made an eloquent case for the Slow philosophy. In a sermon entitled “Slow Down!” he told his congregation that life “requires moments of intense exertion and quickened pace.… But it also requires a pause now and then—a Sabbath moment to assess where we are going, how quickly we wish to get there—and, more important, why. Slow can be beautiful.” When Thich Nhat Hanh, a well-known Buddhist leader, visited Denver, Colorado, in 2002, more than five thousand people came to hear him speak. He urged them to slow down, “to take the time to live more deeply.” New Age gurus preach a similar message.

  So does that mean we have to be spiritual, or “New Age-y,” to be Slow? In our cynical, secular world, it is a question that matters. Many people, including me, are wary of any movement that promises to open the door to spiritual nirvana. Religion has never been a big part of my life, and many New Age practices strike me as mumbo-jumbo. I want to slow down without being bullied into finding God or embracing crystals and astrology. Ultimately, the success of the Slow movement will depend on how smoothly it can reconcile people like me with decelerators of a more spiritual bent.

  It will also depend on the economic case for saying no to speed. How much, if any, material wealth will we have to sacri
fice, individually and collectively, in order to live Slow? Are we able, or willing, to pay the price? And to what extent is slowing down a luxury for the affluent? These are big questions that the Slow movement must answer.

  If they are to make any headway at all, pro-Slow campaigners must root out the deep prejudice against the very idea of slowing down. In many quarters, “slow” remains a dirty word. Just look at how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it: “not understanding readily, dull, uninteresting, not learning easily, tedious, slack, sluggish.” Hardly the sort of stuff you would put on your CV. In our hyped-up, faster-is-better culture, a turbocharged life is still the ultimate trophy on the mantelpiece. When people moan, “Oh, I’m so busy, I’m run off my feet, my life is a blur, I haven’t got time for anything,” what they often mean is, “Look at me: I am hugely important, exciting and energetic.” Though men seem to like speed more than women, both sexes indulge in faster-than-thou one-upmanship. With a mixture of pride and pity, New Yorkers marvel at the slower pace of life elsewhere in the United States. “It’s like they’re on vacation all the time,” sniffs one female Manhattanite. “If they tried to live like that in New York, they’d be toast.”

  Perhaps the greatest challenge of the Slow movement will be to fix our neurotic relationship with time itself. To teach us, in the words of Golda Meir, the former Israeli leader, how to “ … govern the clock, not be governed by it.” This may already be happening, below the radar. As the Curator of Time at the Science Museum in London, David Rooney oversees a splendid collection of five hundred timekeeping devices, ranging from ancient sundials and hourglasses to modern quartz watches and atomic clocks. Not surprisingly, the bespectacled twenty-eight-year-old has a claustrophobic relationship with time. On his wrist he wears a terrifyingly accurate radio-controlled watch. An antenna hidden in the wristband receives a daily update from Frankfurt. If the watch misses a signal, the number 1 appears in the lower left corner of the screen. If it misses the next day’s signal, the number changes to 2, and so on. All of this accuracy makes Rooney very anxious indeed.

  “I feel a real sense of loss when I miss my signal,” he tells me as we wander round the museum’s Measuring Time exhibit, raising our voices to be heard over the persistent tick-tock-tick-tock. “When the counter on the watch reaches 2, I get worried. Once it went to 3, and I had to leave it in a drawer at home. I get stressed knowing it’s just a millisecond out.”

  Rooney knows this is not healthy behaviour, but he sees hope for the rest of us. The historical trend towards embracing ever more accurate timepieces has finally come to an end with the radio-controlled watch, which failed to catch on as a consumer product. People would rather put style ahead of accuracy by wearing a Swatch or a Rolex. Rooney thinks this reflects a subtle shift in our feelings about time.

  “In the Industrial Revolution, when life became ruled by work, we lost control over our use of time,” he says. “What we’re seeing now is maybe the beginnings of a reaction against that. People seem to have reached the point where they don’t want to have their time diced up into smaller and smaller pieces, with greater and greater accuracy. They don’t want to be obsessed with time, or a slave to the clock. There may be an element of ‘the boss keeps time, so I don’t want to.’”

  A few months after our meeting, Rooney decided to tackle his own obsessive timekeeping. Instead of fretting over mislaid milliseconds, he now wears a 1960s windup watch that is usually around five minutes off. “It’s my own reaction against too much accuracy,” he tells me. Rooney deliberately chose a windup watch to symbolize regaining the upper hand over time. “If you don’t wind it every day, it stops, so you’re in control,” he says. “I feel like time is working for me now, rather than the other way round, which makes me feel less pressured. I don’t hurry so much.”

  Some people are going even further. On a recent trip to Germany, my interpreter raved about the benefits of not wearing a watch at all. He remains scrupulously punctual, thanks to the clock on his mobile phone, but his former obsession with minutes and seconds is waning. “Not having a watch on my wrist definitely makes me more relaxed about time,” he told me. “It is easier for me to slow down, because time is not always there in my line of vision saying, ‘No, you must not slow down, you must not waste me, you must hurry.’”

  Time is certainly a hot topic these days. How should we use it? Who controls it? How can we be less neurotic about it? Jeremy Rifkin, the American economist, thinks it could be the defining issue of the twenty-first century. “A battle is brewing over the politics of time,” he wrote in his 1987 book Time Wars. “Its outcome could determine the future course of politics around the world in the coming century.” It will certainly help to determine the future of the Slow movement.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOOD: TURNING THE

  TABLES ON SPEED

  We are what we eat.

  —LUDWIG FEUERBACH, NINETEENTH-CENTURY

  GERMAN PHILOSOPHER

  HAVE YOU EVER SEEN The Jetsons, the old American cartoon about life in the distant, high-tech future? It gave many children their first glimpse of what the twenty-first century might look like. The Jetsons were a traditional family of four who inhabited a world where everything was super-fast, ultra-convenient and totally manmade. Spaceships blazed across the sky, couples vacationed on Venus, robots dashed through the domestic chores. When it came to cooking, the Jetsons left McDonald’s in the dust. At the push of a button, their “home food dispenser” spat out synthetic servings of lasagna, roast chicken and chocolate brownies. The family lapped it up. Sometimes, the Jetsons just ate pills for dinner.

  Even growing up in a foodie household, I remember liking the idea of an all-in-one meal pill. I imagined gulping it down and heading straight back outside to play with my friends. Of course, the idea of instant food was not invented by The Jetsons—it is an inevitable fantasy in a culture desperate to do everything faster. In 1958, four years before the first episode of The Jetsons was made, Cosmopolitan magazine predicted, without a hint of sadness, that one day every meal would be prepared in the microwave, which first hit the consumer market in the early 1950s. To remind us of a time when cooking was less rushed and more real, we would spray artificial aromas—think fresh bread, sizzling sausages, roasted garlic—around the kitchen. In the end, the Cosmo prophecy turned out to be only half true: these days we are in too much of a hurry to bother with the fake smells. Food, like everything else, has been hijacked by haste. Even if the instant meal pill remains the stuff of sci-fi fantasy, we have all taken a leaf out of the Jetsons’ cookbook.

  Hurry took its place at the dinner table during the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, long before the invention of the drive-thru burger bar, one observer summed up the American way of eating as “gobble, gulp and go.” Margaret Visser notes, in The Rituals of Dinner, that industrializing societies came to prize speed as a “sign of control and efficiency” in formal dining. By the late 1920s, Emily Post, the doyenne of American etiquette, decreed that a dinner party should last no longer than two and a half hours, from the first ring of the doorbell to the departure of the last guest. Today, most meals are little more than refuelling pit stops. Instead of sitting down with family or friends, we often eat solo, on the move or while doing something else—working, driving, reading the newspaper, surfing the Net. Nearly half of Britons now eat their evening meal in front of the TV, and the average British family spends more time together in the car than they do around the table. When families do eat together, it is often at fast-food joints like McDonald’s, where the average meal lasts eleven minutes. Visser reckons that communal dining is too slow for the modern world: “In comparison with acting out a sudden whim to consume a microwaved mug of soup within the next five minutes, eating together with friends can come to seem a formal, implacably structured and time-consuming event … whereas being in one’s own personal hurry must be free and preferable.”

  The acceleration at the table is mirrored on
the farm. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides, intensive feeding, antibiotic digestive enhancers, growth hormones, rigorous breeding, genetic modification—every scientific trick known to man has been deployed to cut costs, boost yields and make livestock and crops grow more quickly. Two centuries ago, the average pig took five years to reach 130 pounds; today, it hits 220 pounds after just six months and is slaughtered before it loses its baby teeth. North American salmon are genetically modified to grow four to six times faster than the average. The small landowner gives way to the factory farm, which churns out food that is fast, cheap, abundant and standardized.

  As our forebears moved into the cities and lost touch with the land, they fell in love with the idea of fast food for a fast age. The more processed, the more convenient, the better. Restaurants in the 1950s gave tinned soups pride of place on the menu. At Tad’s 30 Varieties of Meals, an American chain, diners cooked frozen meals at tableside microwave ovens. Around the same time, the big fast-food chains began applying the ruthless logic of mass production that would eventually bring us the 99-cent hamburger.

  As life got faster, people rushed to replicate the convenience of fast food at home. In 1954, Swanson unveiled the first TV dinner—a highly processed, all-in-one platter containing turkey with cornbread dressing and gravy, sweet potatoes and buttered peas. Husbands angry that their wives no longer cooked from scratch deluged the company with hate mail, but the cult of convenience rolled on like a juggernaut. Five years later, another classic culinary time-saver, the instant noodle, made its debut in Japan. Everywhere food came to be marketed less for its flavour and nutritional value than for how little time it took to make. Uncle Ben’s famously wooed harried housewives with the slogan: “Long grain rice that’s ready in … five minutes!”

  Once microwave ovens colonized kitchens in the 1970s, cooking was measured in seconds. Suddenly, Swanson’s original TV dinner, which took twenty-five minutes to cook in a conventional oven, looked sundial slow. The cake-mix market collapsed like a bungled soufflé because not enough people were willing to sacrifice thirty minutes to work up the recipe. Today, even the simplest fare, from scrambled eggs to mashed potatoes, comes in an instant format. Supermarkets stock ready-made versions of almost every meal under the sun—curries, hamburgers, roast meats, sushi, salads, stews, casseroles, soups. To keep pace with its impatient customers, Uncle Ben’s developed microwaveable rice that’s ready in two minutes.