In Praise of Slowness

December 26, 2006-January 2, 2007
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore

This book got read at the perfect time for me. I have owned this copy for well over a year, and had started reading it more than once in the past, but this time it stuck because the timing was right. It is a wonderful after vacation book, because the idea of the appeal of moving slower through life is clear when you have been doing just that, and it is a good New Years book because the idea of taking control of the way that you live your life is at the heart of pretty much all New Year's resolutions.

The basic idea of the book is that the human race has managed, with the help of technology, competition, and our own inner drives, to speed up our lives to pathological levels, and that we could all benefit from a bit of a slow down. Honore asserts in the introduction several times that he is not a Luddite, or really opposed to speed in all cases, but rather that he believes that unmitigated haste is not the right tempo for all of life's activities. That point is supported by some pretty sobering data and antidotes from modern living. The book then goes on to talk about ways that people are adding a little slowness to their lives in a number of different areas, from food and sex to exercise and the office. Honore is clearly attached to the idea that the desire to slow down, and the ways in which people do so, amounts to a global movement, and while I think that is perhaps taking it a bit too far, he makes a compelling case for moving through life a little more slowly and with a little more thought.

Now this is not the most well-written book that I have ever encountered. Honore is frequently repetitive, and relies far too heavily on the testimony of people converted in one way or another to the Slow (and yes, he uses the capital) way of living. After the general idea is introduced, we hear from people who started eating slower and now say their whole lives are better, then from people who started living in communities that allow for more walking and how their whole lives are better, then from people that exercise slowly and how their whole lives are better... and so on.

But for me, someone who recognizes, at least a little bit, the insanity of the frenzy that has crept into the way that I approach my life, the ideas, if not always the way that they were presented, were quite compelling. I saw so much of myself in the following quote from one of the introductory chapters that I was willing to hear some suggestions from the other end of the speed spectrum.

"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.'"

Because I was coming off that cruise, and thinking about my upcoming New Year's resolutions, seeing so much of myself in that sentence was a little bit frightening, because I don't really believe that it is healthy for me to be that way. And when I really think about it, I know that I am not more energetic when I am pushed to the limits, and I am certainly not more exciting when my schedule is so rigid and packed that I don't have time for anything new or spontaneous.

So I was ready for some other ideas, and with that kind of open mind, it seemed as if many of the people that Honore meets with to write this book have the right idea. I do eat too fast, and it keeps me from getting the most enjoyment out of the food (while encouraging me to get the most calories.) I do drive in ways that are probably dangerous. I know from experience that a flexible work schedule can make life a thousand times more livable, and so on. This really allowed me to think about a bunch of areas that might provide room for a more regulated tempo in my life, and made me realize that I have, in some ways, managed to take even some of the things that he advocates as Slow leisure activities (knitting and pleasure reading) and turned them into a race.

And while I don't think that all of this is cultural, or that I can trace my stress directly back to the invention of the sundial, I am convinced, quite thoroughly, that pacing is something that I need to pay more attention to, and that there are areas where I want to make changes.

This book is not for everyone. Some people might find it a little bit too much. But if you're feeling like life is a little (or a lot) more frantic than it probably should be, you might want to look into it. It provides a bunch of suggestions and a pretty comprehensive study of some of the details of where we are as a culture, how we've gotten this far, and some options for taking that back. Some of the ideas are appealing and can be tried out right away (walking more, yoga, simply taking a time out when you need it) while other sections of the text discuss larger scale, and I think very flawed efforts. (The entirety of France being limited to a state mandated 35-hour work week is insanity). Different areas may work for different people. For example the chapter on city development spoke to my interests less personally than the one on slow medicine, which had me thinking for quite a while about the way that I want to practice someday, but I can think of people for whom the exact opposite would be true. If you want to slow your life down, or just find more balance in your pacing, this book may help you find a way to do just that.

Of course it may also force you, as it forced me, to face some cruel realities about the way that speed has crept into your life, and the level of the challenge that you face in getting rid of it. For example, the chapter on raising children is largely devoted to the structure of education and the idea that a less hurried one is better. That's all well and good if less parental pressure would really leave a legion of carefree kiddies, or if less emphasis on testing would produce a world in which all children could learn in a pressure free environment. But I'm not convinced that's true. Thinking back on my education, I think that the source of the pressure that pushed me into the speed that still dominates some areas of my life was a little closer to home, and Honore doesn't seem to have too many ideas for dealing with those of us that are intrinsically driven by something in the personality that pushes to more more more without the need for crazy teachers and overbearing parents. (I had neither.)

But this is not a self-help book either, so that's not Honore's job. I suppose that I would classify it as a work of social observation and commentary, and it can serve that purpose without trying to conquer all of my speeding demons. Besides, the belief that Honore puts at the core of his movement is not that everything should be done slowly, but rather that everything should be done at an appropriate pace for the action, something that he describes with the musical term tempo giusto.

"The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. I means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up."

I think, at the most basic levels, that this message is a good one, and one that a lot of us can really stand to hear.



Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out the 2007 Booklist
Want to read a little more about the process of this blog? Check out Bookworming in 2007

The 2007 Booklist

December 26, 2006 - January 2, 2007
In Praise of Slowness:
Challenging the Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore
c. 2004
321 pages

January 3, 2007-
Under the Banner of Heaven:
A Story of Violent Faith
by Jon Krakauer
c. 2003
399 pages

Dates unknown in January and February and March
A Walk in the Woods
by Bill Bryson
c. 1997
350 pages

Magical Thinking:
True Stories
by Augusten Burroughs
c. 2004
268 pages

Dry: A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs
c. 2003
309 pages

The Orchid Thief
by Susan Orlean
c. 1998
282 pages

Attention. Deficit. Disorder.
by Brad Listi
c. 2006
356 pages

The City Of Falling Angels
by John Berendt
c. 2005
398 pages

March 10-12, 2007
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
by J.K. Rowling
c. 2005
652 pages

March 12-13, 2007
A Perfect Mess:
The Hidden Benefits of Disorder
by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
c. 2006
316 pages

March 14-15, 2007
Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin
c. 1967
308 pages

March 16-19, 2007
The World According to Garp
by John Irving
c. 1976
437 pages

March 19
How We Are Hungry
by Dave Eggers
c. 2004
218 pages

Dates Unknown in March, April and May

i, Robot
by Isaac Asimov
c. 1950
272 pages

Star
by Pamela Anderson
c. 2004
294 pages

No Touch Monkey!
And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late
by Ayun Halliday
c. 2003
273 pages

My Friend Leonard
by James Frey
c. 2005
357 pages

The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
c. 2005
642 pages

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk
c. 2007
320 pages

Complications:
A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
by Atul Gawande
c. 2002
252 pages

Four Blondes
by Candace Bushnell
c. 2000
245 pages

For Us, The Living
by Robert Heinlein
(lent to Andrew before I put it in here)

Lipstick Jungle
by Candace Bushnell
c. 2005
532 pages

Right Now:
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
c. 1998
543 pages

Bookworming in 2007

Thoughts on reading in 2007.

I have started 2007 with two things that are going to change at least a little bit the way that this blog works. The first is a beautiful journal that Andrew gave to me sometime in November and the second is the book that I just read that allowed me to start writing in that journal.

For all you non-Andrew readers, this journal is a thick volume bound in wonderfully soft leather. I adore it. It's the kind of journal that the journal-loving part of me has lusted after for years but wouldn't allow myself to buy. It's beautiful and it has nice paper and it smells nice and feels nice in your hands. It ties shut with soft leather laces, has a soft leather page marker sewn into the binding, and has beautiful script in what I think is Italian printed on the covers. It's awesome.

Andrew got me this journal to encourage me to write more about what I read. The hope is that this will force me to THINK more about what I read, and maybe allow me to see how my thinking changes. Besides, I suppose that you never know when you are going to come up with something good, or at least something that might be useful in later reading or writing, so this journal is a way to organize those thoughts.

And for about a month, I was afraid of it.

The perfectionist in me didn't want to write in the journal until I had something particularly coherent and perfect to say. I mean, this collection of blank paper is beautiful so it seemed important somehow that the things that I put in there be polished and beautiful too, which of course was the exact opposite of the point, but sometimes I have a very very hard time squashing that perfectionist in me... she's persistent.

However, after a loverly and relaxing cruise with Andrew, I was reading during the trip home, and I wanted to write something. Part of this, of course was the annual New Year's bravery that comes over all of us, (Next year, I can do ANYTHING!) but another part was that the book that I was reading, In Praise of Slowness, left me thinking about things that I wanted to say, or at least, thinking about things that I wanted to think about on paper.

So I said them and thought about them, and over the next week and a half of reading that book and writing about it as I went, I have kicked off the use of that journal with no less than 27 pages of my thoughts about In Praise of Slowness and thoughts about my life in general that were brought on by the ideas in the book.

And all this writing felt good, although sometimes I have had trouble making myself slow down the reading enough to actually do it. Still, I feel that I really learned something from the whole thing, both the writing, and the act of writing about this particular book (which actually has a section, which I read after starting the journal, that suggests reading more slowly and deliberately and writing about what you read as a way to slow down and lead a calmer life.)

I think that I enjoyed the reading more because I did it less frantically, and I certainly got more out of it because I allowed the writing to open my mind and let me make some connections to my own life that maybe weren't obvious from the beginning or needed some time to flesh out in my head.

So for 2007, I am going to keep this beautiful leather journal with me, and I am going to use it, and the first 27 pages of writing that it contains to remind me that my reading is not a race. I'll be writing in it as I read, and reading and thinking more slowly than in the past. (For an example of the past, see the start of this blog, when I was reading so fast that the idea of writing even a page about the books became overwhelming and the blog trailed off as quickly as it started.)

Here I am going to write something like a review or a summary of those thoughts and the way that they developed after I have finished the books and taken the time to look back over and think about what I have written. Not just a rehashing, but a closing of my conversation with the book that I just read.

Its going to be a lot more work, and take a lot more time on my part, but I think that the action of taking more time is going to allow me to go deeper into the books, and will allow the books to have more of an effect on me, and for that alone, I think that it will be worth it. We'll see as it comes...

Welcome to 2007.