Our Town: Trying to slow the speed of modern life

Dr Tom Ferraro

A walk through the woods in solitude and amidst  beauty and silence is one of life’s real pleasures, but eventually the trail ends and you must emerge from the woods and return to back to modern life.

Even Henry David Thoreau had to leave Walden Pond after a year.

Last week I had the pleasure of a walk through Bailey’s Arboretum and wrote about transcendentalism, which was America’s last great philosophical movement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau and Walt Whitman were agents of transcendentalism back in the early 1800s, and that movement was our last, great grasp at nature, the sublime and the spiritual.

Soon after this America experienced the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, and the true birth the mechanical age.

In the place of nature we now have a flood of technological inventions, including phones, trains, planes, televisions, radios, computers and more.

The quintessential technological advance is the automobile.

The auto represents the best and the worst of modern technology.

As luck would have it, I came across an automobile show last week on my way home from Bailey’s Arboretum.

It was held in the parking lot of New York Institute of Technology.

The experience there gave me a chance to study the objects on display.

When I was in the woods at the Bailey’s estate, I could feel the silence, the calm and the sublime beauty of the trees.

When one looks at cars, you can also learn stuff, too.

Let’s take the good stuff about cars.

Every car I looked at was a thing of beauty.

There was a yellow Lamborghini and next to it a red Ferrari and a cute vintage Alpha Romeo and even a 1970 Camaro just like the one I had in my energetic youth.

These cars were unquestionably beautiful.

And they were also fast, actually very fast.

And they were also expensive, very expensive.

And all were as irresistible as a beautiful woman is irresistible.

It’s something that you want the moment you see it.

Of course the result of this is a culture addicted to beauty and willing to work itself to death in order to buy these things.

Granted, one may not look as good as Matthew McConaughey, but you will still be looking pretty good.

We’re all speeded up to the max.

In the Henry Adams essay, “A Law of Acceleration,” back in 1904 he predicted many things.

He felt that the rise of coal power, steam power, electric power and nuclear power would take us into a new reality and that we would need to create a new social mind to cope.

He used the metaphor of a comet to describe the speed of human progress since 1800.

The way I see it is that we are now in some kind of war.

On one side is technological marvels and electronic entertainment.

Let’s call this side SPEED.

It is best expressed in all those zombie films where the walking dead run really fast to eat people.

This is the SPEED side of things.

And on the other side of the war is silence and nature and peace and stillness and mystery and magic.

The only way to get to that kind of peace  is to be very still or as Buddhists say “be here now.”

Let’s call this side STILLNESS.

SPEED versus STILLNESS.

There is no question that SPEED is winning this battle.

True, we have imported some practices from Asia like yoga and meditation to slow us down, but even my yoga instructors seem to rush from one class to the next to keep up.

If you float concepts like asceticism or fasting you sound un-American.

The last President to touch this issue of overspending and overreaching toward the superficial was Jimmy Carter during his “malaise speech.”

He criticized the nation for being overly materialistic and consumeristic.

That speech got him voted out of office and in came Ronald Reagan.

So the war of SPEED versus STILLNESS rages on.

SPEED seems to be winning, but no one seems very happy about the state of things.

Not many smiling faces amongst all of us rat racers.

The best I can do to fight off this speed is to take a hot bath while I rest in the warm tub and read some Thoreau or Emerson or Melville or Hawthorne or Whitman.

These were the Romantics of long ago who liked to glorify the beauty of nature.

In preparation for a trip to Rome next week, I have been reading Hawthorne’s “The Marble Fawn,” Goethe’s “The Italian Journey” and Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.”

Hawthorne spent a full year in Rome, Goethe spent nine months there and Gilbert was there for four months.

They sauntered about at their leisure, taking in the views offered by the Forum, the Coliseum, the Spanish Steps, St. Peters Square and the Borghese Gardens.

These three books were wonderful to read.

And now I am faced with the daunting task of appreciating Rome within the span of a mere six days rather than six months.

Such is the nature of SPEED in modern life.

Gentleman and ladies, start your engines.

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