Discuss: Finding Time

Hi Rebecca,

A couple of comments.

1. Please stop saying things like “Europeans work far less than we do”. I worked at the same office job at the same level in Canada and France, and even with all my extra vacation in France, I work more hours per year here due to the longer workday.

2. Because of the internet, my new-born daughter has regular video conversations with her grandparents on a different continent. She talks with them for hours. Long enough so that the first time she met them, she said “grandpa” and ran straight to their arms. This is the internet permitting a human relationship that would not have had the same strength otherwise. In some cases, these new products really do open up new worlds.

3. Despite this, and despite what I think is a silght excess in romanticism in your article, I agree with you. Certainly, there is something ambiguously valuable out there that is crushed by marketing language. I think, however, that we can express it, that we can “fight” the language of commerce, without accepting that it is something too vague to capture in words. I hope I am not hearing despair in your argument.

I agree that slow living is a necessiry for learning. But Mrs.Solnit’s recent effort on this matter, ie. the analog to the 4 Horsemen, etc. is a shallow piece more in keeping with yellow journalism than with real thought processes.
Have a nice day
Max Edge

Back there on Oct. 22nd, at comment #20, Annie Morgan referred to slowness as one of the ‘perks’ of retirement. 
While I agree with her sentiment to some extent, writing as a fixed-income ‘retiree’ [I work a part-time job 2 days a week to keep the wolf on the other side of the door], I can inform you that it may not just be a perk but may also become an enforced way of life as a result of one’s economic circumstances.
If I read the statistics on personal savings for retirement among the Boomer generation correctly, we’re about to see a huge surge in ‘slowing down’ in our culture in the very near future.

So you use this piece to advertise your book on Amazon.com. Like all technophones who use technology, you are a hypocrite.

This article is very elegant from a language point of view, and a disaster from a thinking point of view.  The supporting arguments for the horsemen metaphor are tepid, incomplete and deliberatly misleading. 
The human brain is capable of both logic and metaphor, each yielding its own fruit. Why do we have to rank one ahead of the other? This false binary choice has much more to do with a need for committment to a personal for idealogy than with celebrating the choices we have come to take forgranted in the 21st century. The process of projecting a personal experience/preference into a “preferred” recommendation for all of humanity is a very dangerous one - history to wit. 
On the personal side I am a big proponent of being “Surprised by Joy” in the most unexpected places (one of them is the world of technology,which does use language to describe the ‘yet to undiscovered and yet to undescribed’). There are many ironic threads in this piece (not the least of which directs us to Amazon to buy Rebecca’s books), time is a technology/physics construct - Rebecca if are you saying that you can find technology through poetry, I agree.

I’m surprised that people have labeled Ms. Solnit’s piece shallow or glib. The extreme capitalist nature of our society--and increasingly, the globalized society--ensures that Security, Profitability, Efficiency and Convenience will be tenets valued above all others. This seems pretty indisputable.
I sensed a defensiveness among some of the responses, from people who have, under the glazed glare of their computer screen, undoubtedly, sadly, begun to confuse numbed titillation for real human feeling.  The defensiveness is repressed guilt: we know this stuff is killing us but we eat it, or watch it, or listen to it anyway. It tastes too good.
And no, Kevin, it’s not hypocritical to elucidate the evils of technology and also to engage in its services. The internet is a great tool; more people will read this essay because it was posted on the internet than otherwise.
The question becomes how to use technology while remaining balanced, human.

“that to speak this slow language you must slow down, and to slow down you must have some inkling of what you will gain by doing so.”

This sounds so simple. It is elegantly expressed. I had no inkling of what I would gain.  I was highly educated, ambitious to change the world and a success to my family and peers.  I was granted the gift of unemployment in midlife and found my true self in the pain and enforced slowness.  I had no idea I would survive or find the world in a quiet morning walk.  Although we may hope we could teach these profound lessons, my experience has been that those most in need are deaf and blind.  So my life itself becomes my work of art.  My daily ambiguous, unconventional, nonconformist and peculiar life that disappoints my family, puzzles my peers and delights my nieces and nephews.
Thank you for your beautiful insight.  I discovered your article and this magazine by accident.  Another gift of being directionless. Permission to come aboard and go along for the ride?
nmw

Amazing article, a concept I have tried to articulate to friends and family since I was a teenager but never could really articulate it..