In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

In this book, Carl Honore presents a powerful critique of the rat race. Americans are stressed out, harried, and busy, busy, busy . . . and for what?

Honore shows us that here in the modern age, society has become so focused on speed and efficiency that we have lost touch with the most important things in life, and we are none the better for it. In fact, we are worse. Our families, our health, our spiritual lives, our schools, our environment, etc., are suffering because of our society's idolization of speed and efficiency at the expense of quality.

Although Honore goes over the top at times, I think he's right overall. I see this needless rushing in my own life, and I see it in people around me who are flying around from one activity to the next without much time to slow down and reflect.

Honore reminds us of what we already know: The good things in life take time. Things like our health; the quality of our work; our ability to be creative and innovative; the quality of our food; and our relationships.

Here are a few notable quotations from the book:

"Young people today are certainly busier, more scheduled, more rushed than my generation ever was. Recently, a teacher I know approached the parents of a child in her care. She felt the boy was spending too long at school and was enrolled in too many extracurricular activities. Give him a break, she suggested. The father was furious. 'He has to learn to do a ten-hour day, just like me,' he snapped. The child was four."

***

"What is the very first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Draw the curtains? Roll over to snuggle up to your partner or pillow? Spring out of bed and do ten push-ups to get the blood pumping? No, the first thing you do, the first thing everyone does, is check the time. From its perch on the bedside table, the clock gives us our bearings, telling us not only where we stand vis-à-vis the rest of the day, but also how to respond. If it's early, I close my eyes and go back to sleep. If it's late, I spring out of bed and make a beeline for the bathroom. Right from that first waking moment, the clock calls the shots."

***

"Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections--with people, culture, work, food, everything."

***

"[On many farms today,] chemical fertilizers and pesticides, intensive feeding, antibiotic digestive enhancers, growth hormones, rigorous breeding, genetic modification--every scientific trick known to man has been deployed to cut costs, boost yields and make livestock and crops grow more quickly. Two centuries ago, the average pig took five years to reach 130 pounds; today it hits 220 pounds after just six months and is slaughtered before it loses its baby teeth. North American salmon are genetically modified to grow four to six times faster than the average. The small landowner gives way to the factory farm, which churns out food that is fast, cheap, abundant and standardized."

***

"There is something in the nature of cooking and eating together that forms a bond between people. It is no accident that the word "companion" is derived from Latin words meaning "with bread." A relaxed, convivial meal has a calming, even civilizing, effect, smoothing away the smash-and-grab haste of modern life."

***

"[Uwe] Kliemt and his allies believe that musicians began playing faster at the dawn of the industrial era. As the world sped up, they sped up with it. In the early nineteenth century, the public fell in love with a new generation of virtuoso pianists, among them the supremely gifted Franz Liszt, who played with dazzling dexterity. For the virtuoso, cranking up the tempo was one way to flaunt his technical brilliance--and give the audience a thrill.

Advances in instrument technology may have also encouraged faster playing. In the nineteenth century, the piano came to the fore. It was more powerful and better suited to running notes together than were its predecessors, the harpsichord and the clavichord. In 1878, Brahms wrote that 'on the piano . . . everything happens faster, much livelier, and lighter in tempo.'

Mirroring the modern obsession with efficiency, musical teaching took on an industrial ethic. Students began practicing by playing notes, rather than compositions. A long-hours culture took hold. Modern piano students can spend six to eight hours a day . . . Chopin recommended no more than three.

In Kliemt's view, all of these trends helped to fuel the acceleration of classical music. "Think of the greatest composers in the pre-twentieth-century canon--Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms," he says. 'We play them all too fast.'"

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