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In
Praise of Slowness
Reviewed by Michael
Haaren
I’ve been reading
Carl Honore’s excellent paperback on
slowing down, In
Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed ,
and it brings me back, with a question, to
my childhood in rural Virginia.
My town had 300
people in it, surrounded by many more milk
cows, and the pace – especially compared to Stratford-on-Inner-Loop-of-the-Beltway, Virginia,
where I live now – was decidedly “slow.”
Of course, it didn’t
seem slow (except when I became a
teenager, and craved velocity, as most teenagers do), and I think
that’s one of
the issues we in the US struggle with now: Before, say, the 1960s,
there were
many places that were “organically slow,” and many Boomers, for
example, can
still recall the easy feel of those pre-suburban environments, like
mine.
But now – and this is
my question – with so many among us
having been born and raised in suburbs, where “time” and schedules are
king, and
knowing nothing else, how can those 150M or so get comfortable in a
pre-suburban frame of mind?
But maybe it’s a
question of easing into it, by degrees,
acclimating the body and mind to a different sense of time (or no sense
of time
at all), as the author and his subjects often suggest. In his
well-researched book
we encounter such fascinating supporters of a healthier time sense as:
-- The Long Now Foundation
(building huge clocks that tick
once a year).
-- The Society for the Deceleration of
Time, whose members
set “speed traps” for pedestrians, and oblige “speeders,” in good fun,
to walk
slowly with a complicated tortoise marionette.
-- Italy’s
Slow Food movement, founded by Carlo Petrini,
which stresses the importance of eating together, and regularly, in
moderation,
and moving away from “industrialized agriculture” and toward real
communities.
For more, click
here to see an interview with Petrini.
.
I felt myself slowing
down, pleasurably, just reading
Honore’s book, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who ever chewed an
antacid. (I ate two meeting the deadline for this review.)
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