Speed and the Modern Condition

"I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to savor that moment, to live in that moment for a week. But I couldn't stop it, only slow it." --Cashback (2006)

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting...In existential mathematics, the experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting." --Milan Kundera, Slowness (1995)

Today, by serendipitous circumstance, I delved into two excellent, and complementary works of art. One a movie. The other a novel.



Speed and modernity. It is a subject that has enthralled artists since the early 20th Century, when the pace of the human condition suddenly accelerated with the first sputtering automobiles, and the realization of the elusive dream of heavier-than-air flight in Kitty Hawk, NC.



Geography was flattened and foreshortened. Man's reach broadened. His pace quickened. The future grew closer. The past further away. Time, always relative, became shorter. And so too, did memory...

Is this why we continue to stumble into the same mistakes, over and over? Can we slow life down for a moment, to reflect, to remember? Hopefully we can, because our future depends on it.

"The bad news is that time flies. The good news... is that you're the pilot." --Cashback (2006)