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ageorgiadis 's review for:
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
by Carl Honoré
Boredom – the word itself hardly existed 150 years ago – is a modern invention.
p11
Interesting and diverting book, with some fluff. Would have been more effective as a New Yorker piece (as far as I can find, no such long-form journalistic correlate exists). The thesis: we are doing many things too fast, and there would be benefits to slowing down.
Honoré does a nice job sectioning the book into areas that are easily digestible: slow food, slow cities, slow medicine, slow music, slow sex, slow schooling, and so on.
There are certainly virtues in taking one’s time, reflecting, and there’s no doubt that mental health would improve (for many of us) with a slower pace of living. Further, the author isn’t slavishly pushing slowness in all things or situations, but a healthy dose of it, selectively, where its effects can be refreshing or salutary.
I found the areas where scientific and historical data existed to be the most interesting. For example, dissection of personal journals from 3-4 centuries ago suggests that we are playing some classical music literally too fast , perhaps 30-50% quicker than intended. Some people advocate extending a slowdown to all music, in order to appreciate hidden tones and feelings that are otherwise obscured with their current pace. Pretty novel idea, and was all new information to me.
Some historical writers had provocative views about time, not even 150 years ago, which are almost unintelligible today: some were opposed to the very notion of universal time (i.e. that a standardized unit, like an hour or day, should be imposed on everyone):
“The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.”
-Charles Dudley Warner, p44
The books lags strategically, in my view, when it is puffed up by Honoré’s thesaurus and his desire to languidly describe his own personal experiences at restaurants, for example. I found these parts tedious.
“Being slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast do you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we’re fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”
-p16, Carlo Petrini (founder of the Slow Food movement)
p11
Interesting and diverting book, with some fluff. Would have been more effective as a New Yorker piece (as far as I can find, no such long-form journalistic correlate exists). The thesis: we are doing many things too fast, and there would be benefits to slowing down.
Honoré does a nice job sectioning the book into areas that are easily digestible: slow food, slow cities, slow medicine, slow music, slow sex, slow schooling, and so on.
There are certainly virtues in taking one’s time, reflecting, and there’s no doubt that mental health would improve (for many of us) with a slower pace of living. Further, the author isn’t slavishly pushing slowness in all things or situations, but a healthy dose of it, selectively, where its effects can be refreshing or salutary.
I found the areas where scientific and historical data existed to be the most interesting. For example, dissection of personal journals from 3-4 centuries ago suggests that we are playing some classical music literally too fast , perhaps 30-50% quicker than intended. Some people advocate extending a slowdown to all music, in order to appreciate hidden tones and feelings that are otherwise obscured with their current pace. Pretty novel idea, and was all new information to me.
Some historical writers had provocative views about time, not even 150 years ago, which are almost unintelligible today: some were opposed to the very notion of universal time (i.e. that a standardized unit, like an hour or day, should be imposed on everyone):
“The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.”
-Charles Dudley Warner, p44
The books lags strategically, in my view, when it is puffed up by Honoré’s thesaurus and his desire to languidly describe his own personal experiences at restaurants, for example. I found these parts tedious.
“Being slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast do you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we’re fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”
-p16, Carlo Petrini (founder of the Slow Food movement)