In praise of slowness by Luciano De Crescenzo
When you are young you never have the patience to wait; everything has to be done in a rush, in the shortest possible time, and maybe that’s why revolutions are almost always triggered by the young. It’s not so much a matter of left or right, but rather a question of age: At twenty you run, at forty you wait, at seventy you stand still. The three periods of life known, respectively, as ‘youth’, ‘maturity’, and ‘old age’ could thus aptly be renamed: ‘revolution’, ‘reflection’ and ‘television’. You start out wanting to change the world, and end up changing channels.
Time is strange: It never passes in the same way for two different people and, more peculiar still, it does not even always pass in the same way for any one individual. This was what the philosopher Henry Bergson meant at the beginning of the last century when he said: “Time is not measured with clocks, but with states of mind.” Spending an hour embracing a lover is one thing; an hour under the dentist’s drill is quite another. While with your loved one time flies, under the dentist’s drill, who knows why, time drags its feet.
Yet, if you think about it, slowness is one way of enjoying the beauty of life. You need to grow a little bit older to understand this. Indeed, the secret is not so much prolonging life as broadening it. A book read in a hurry will never be as good as one that you contemplate while reading. Lying in bed with a beautiful companion is even more enjoyable if, during a romantic interlude, we still find time to talk.
Try going to Capri, if possible in company of someone you love, and stop on the Monacone terrace to watch the Faraglioni rocks from above. If this is the first time you’ve ever seen them you will be awe-struck. But even if it is already the hundredth time you will still be amazed. It is important to view the panorama through two pairs of eyes: yours and the eyes of the person close to you. In short, it is a question of time: The eyes see, the brain thinks, the heart beats, and everything becomes even more beautiful. It’s a beauty I can recapture perhaps as much as a full year later, reliving it through my memories. It goes without saying that, at that moment on Capri, I have no impending commitments, no ferryboat that I absolutely need to catch, no plane waiting for me in Naples, and, above all, no nagging job to aggravate me. I know that sooner or later I must die and that the hour of my death, whether I stay gazing at the Faraglioni rocks or go on somewhere else, has already been set by destiny.
At this very moment, through the windows of my office I can see the Pantheon and I think of the Emperor Hadrian who said to the foreign immigrants of his days: “If you have a god to worship, do not worry. Choose a spot in the temple and worship your god, as and when you think is right. Just be sure not to disturb the people next to you.” It is no coincidence that the word Pantheon in Greek means ‘all gods’.
I ask myself if it is possible to do the following things in a hurry: pray, make love, mourn a lost friend, talk to a four-year old child, eat a plate of macaroni with ragout, drink a glass of red wine, remember your first true love, listen to a Beethoven symphony, and so on and so forth. That is impossible? Then three cheers for slowness – or to say it with Svetonius: “Festina lente” – make haste slowly.
Taken from Focus Online 1/2005
Time is strange: It never passes in the same way for two different people and, more peculiar still, it does not even always pass in the same way for any one individual. This was what the philosopher Henry Bergson meant at the beginning of the last century when he said: “Time is not measured with clocks, but with states of mind.” Spending an hour embracing a lover is one thing; an hour under the dentist’s drill is quite another. While with your loved one time flies, under the dentist’s drill, who knows why, time drags its feet.
Yet, if you think about it, slowness is one way of enjoying the beauty of life. You need to grow a little bit older to understand this. Indeed, the secret is not so much prolonging life as broadening it. A book read in a hurry will never be as good as one that you contemplate while reading. Lying in bed with a beautiful companion is even more enjoyable if, during a romantic interlude, we still find time to talk.
Try going to Capri, if possible in company of someone you love, and stop on the Monacone terrace to watch the Faraglioni rocks from above. If this is the first time you’ve ever seen them you will be awe-struck. But even if it is already the hundredth time you will still be amazed. It is important to view the panorama through two pairs of eyes: yours and the eyes of the person close to you. In short, it is a question of time: The eyes see, the brain thinks, the heart beats, and everything becomes even more beautiful. It’s a beauty I can recapture perhaps as much as a full year later, reliving it through my memories. It goes without saying that, at that moment on Capri, I have no impending commitments, no ferryboat that I absolutely need to catch, no plane waiting for me in Naples, and, above all, no nagging job to aggravate me. I know that sooner or later I must die and that the hour of my death, whether I stay gazing at the Faraglioni rocks or go on somewhere else, has already been set by destiny.
At this very moment, through the windows of my office I can see the Pantheon and I think of the Emperor Hadrian who said to the foreign immigrants of his days: “If you have a god to worship, do not worry. Choose a spot in the temple and worship your god, as and when you think is right. Just be sure not to disturb the people next to you.” It is no coincidence that the word Pantheon in Greek means ‘all gods’.
I ask myself if it is possible to do the following things in a hurry: pray, make love, mourn a lost friend, talk to a four-year old child, eat a plate of macaroni with ragout, drink a glass of red wine, remember your first true love, listen to a Beethoven symphony, and so on and so forth. That is impossible? Then three cheers for slowness – or to say it with Svetonius: “Festina lente” – make haste slowly.
Taken from Focus Online 1/2005
posted by rsetiawan at 12:05 AM
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