Slowness

I loved the morning: with drizzle or sunshine, I walked to the shadows of the trees along the groove, or vice versa, I would sit for three minutes to close my eyes in front of an open window. There were rest of the fragrant yellow blooming overnight and smell the leaves, pulverized in the muddy grass. There's the sound of chatty birds - yes, morning was the sound of chatty birds. Also the sound of the gecko, a patient heavy sound, one by one, as if against the second speed.

Maybe I liked the morning because there I could take refuge from the second speed, although it did not last, because if the next minute I opened the laptop, there would be burst of the so-called "information" - thousands of words, sounds, numbers and images, news from the site, greetings and swear and complaints for attention on Twitter, showing off  pictures on Facebook, an instant message from a friend and stranger in my mobile phone. They crossed. They drowned. They were remembered but not complete. They were perhaps the statement, perhaps the rushing misunderstanding. They became different.

In front of the laptop, the world against the morning. In front of the laptop, outside the iPad, outside the room, we are projected as if threatened: we are the creatures that will collapse if we do not move quickly. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, disseminates the anxiety, " We're moving from a world in which the big things will consuming the small things towards a world where the quickly things will swallow the slowly things," he said.

I did not want to agree it. The speed ​​was boisterous. I more wanted what was described by Chesterton as "a gift of loneliness, the which is the gift of liberty". Silence has a gift : freedom. But. indeed, there are, indeed more and more, people who deny the gift: those who will be wary  if they do not do anything, they who do not understand how sitting with eyes closed, listening to the sound of rain and the sound of frogs in the gutter - the people who want to quickly end the silent, they are the people surrounded by the calculated time. I never feel free with calculated time, not because every time pursued by the deadline, but maybe because I come from a different generation.  I come from a time when children after dusk lying beside the mother, led to a dream with a long tale.

Maybe that's why I can understand why Carl Honoré has changed. He is a correspondent for various newspapers, including The Economist who writes the news abroad. He's pursuing (or being pursued?) various news of a city  to a foreign city, in and out of the airport and plane, ceaselessly calling editors and news sources (and no longer listen to music on his Walkman), he does not have time to tell long a long story before his kids go to bed.

At one point, when he was queuing at an airport, he read an article, "The One-minute Bedtime Story". He was happy : finally people could make a fairy tale that only one minute in length. He needed to ease as it is, because he could not serve his children request to bring a fun story. Almost every night he had to write, sending an article, answering emails, reading news and discussion.

But how to tell the tales of Hans Christian Andersen in 60 seconds?



Only in slow motion we can trace The Thumbelina's life. A fairy tale will die when it has become an overview.

She did not live with wonder from time to time, since the character was born, kidnapped by a toad, was saved by the fish, butterflies, and mice, and finally got a flower-fairy prince as her partner -- while the blue bird was heartbroken as he watched her go, ...

Eventually Carl Honoré has changed. He wrote In Praise of slowness.

What is somewhat less emphasized by Honoré is the motion relationship with the gift of silence and freedom,  something that has been damaged because the times are changing and people are always anxious to work and work.

Nietzsche once referred to it as the "American's thirst", the inducements to race fast, ("Liquor is Quicker" said the American poet Ogden Nash), also the exchanges.

In the process, people are losing their ability to live the time as an ever new amazement. People also constantly talking about "lack of time." No more people who want to enter the silence of "vita meditativa". There's no reflection before action.

So, thus, was born the Twitter, Facebook which instantly firing the words. If normally each expression to be broadcast must take the layered procedures -- editor, publisher, disseminator -- then now all of them can be skipped. Quickly competition, racing to attract attention, compete to be recognized, racing to shout. I'm making a breakthrough, then I exist.

Speed ​​and strength can be effective as bullets. But the bullets do not need reasoning and they do not grow the desire to share thoughts. "Social media" is ultimately just (to quote a friend who cites Macbeth for this condition) "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".



So, I love my morning. Once in a while there is still a dream, memories of father's fairy tale, mother lullabies, the echo of a song in my head, the novels in solitude and silence last night -- in the the gift of freedom.
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