This sounds an awful lot like I’m stealing from Geoff – but I had just read his thoughts on a Leunig phrase and I had gone hunting for the actual quote and managed to find this in the process. Here is a short segment from an interview with Archbishop Rowan Williams.
RW: …Most of our activities these days have in common a deep impatience. We need to be aware that some things cannot be done impatiently. There are certain aspects, even of the most apparently functional economic life, that you can’t do without taking time. I mean the exercises of life together, the exercises of patience, the exercises of the time taken to listen to someone else’s humanity, whether it’s locally or globally.
ML: Yes, that is endangered perhaps, because it seems to me that speed is revered. And the problem is that certain human things cannot happen at speed. Can you love at speed, can love flourish at speed? That sounds glib, but the dreadful worry for me is that we tend to copy unconsciously our technologies. I think, for example, we imitate the way movies are edited. This cutting and close-up quick grab, this strange traumatic discontinuity, which we accept as normal, and we enjoy it because of its speed and its traumatising stimulus. And there we sit and expose our eyes, the windows of the soul, to this bizarre chopping up of reality. Now we say we can handle this, but I think one thing that’s doing us great damage is this visual cacophony as a depiction of reality. The eye makes great meaning out of life, much more than we understand. It tracks this room as it looks around: as one point leads to the next point, there is sense being made all the time.
And that made me think.
Slow down.
