The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to motorists “a little room.” The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates distance.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given… A modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. The idea that speed devalues space -and that such a devaluation impoverishes our experience of the world, deprives us of beauty and adventure- seems true to me, and easily demonstrated: think of the spaces of your childhood!
As a child, you experience the shed in the backyard, the ditch near your house, tree in the park, the sandbox, the closet, the sofa-fort as wonders of imaginative space. They are worlds! When you revisit the worlds of your past, you at once think, “How small it is.” This is not solely because you’re larger; you are also faster, and your mind -restless, impatient, adult- cannot create in those confines any longer.
Incidentally, art that restores the sense of space I had in childhood is often my favorite art; an excellent example is the work of Joshua Heineman. So is that of Nika States.
Concerns about distance, beauty, and memory recur in Milan Kundera’s works as well; see, for example, his remarks about speed, memory, and forgetting, or the passage below, from Immortality:
A highway differs from a path not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A path is a tribute to space. Every stretch of path has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A high is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
Before paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and enjoy it. What’s more, he no longer saw his own life as a path, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.
Path and highway; these are also two different conceptions of beauty… In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. In the world of paths, beauty is continuous and constantly changes; it tells us at every step: “Stop!”
Both Lewis and Kundera ascribe a violent and self-effacing quality to the obsession with speed, with compressing the world into quanta to be parsed, itemized, counted, rocketed between; Lewis writes, “Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.”
At the beginning: childhood, when the vacant lot next to your house is larger than any field you’ll ever see, any forest you’ll ever explore, a richer world than you’ll experience again: every tree’s bark captivating, every rock covering a menagerie of animals, every hole the lair of a monster. At the end: total compression, completely instantaneous travel throughout your world, the total collapse of reality into a pine box.
Between them, one struggles to keep one’s world as large as possible, not to let it close in around one: one’s city, one’s house, one’s television, one’s mind. One must break routines, abandon highways, sit in sand and dirt, walk paths, find alleys with old boxes to make spaceships out of; or perhaps one can translate childhood play into the language of adulthood; one can figuratively push against, smear paint on, write on the walls, postponing the looming singularity by living as a child does: in the present moment.
(via mills)
Mills hit’s the spot on this one. On some days these ideas worry me. Will I be looking back on a culture that was so caught up on figuring out how to progress? It’s true speed loves to eat up space, and that’s what makes it so appealing. Watching dancers on stage move at ridiculous speeds while at the same time covering the whole stage in the process is extremely exciting. It takes the idea and puts it in a different context. You are in a theatre where the audience has already quantified the distance and space. It’s was exciting because they were able to see how fast you can go from A to B.
My impatience is just a reminder of how fast I want to move sometimes. What for? I wouldn’t mind making a sofa-fort again.
(via tratlee)
