The raindrops dripping on the pavement outside are incessant. Things were fine when I stepped out this morning, but things often deteriorate unpredictably these days.
And yet we press on, as we must.
Speed feels, increasingly, to be the rule. Everything is getting faster, streamlined, efficient. But at what cost? It all makes me want to try and slow down. All this speed feels like a trick, a cleverly devised ruse by those soulless fiends to extract more value from their ‘human resources’.
In a time of incessant acceleration, when there is just so much ‘stuff’ bombarding us from all angles, what else is there to do but slow down and retrain our focus on that which is closer, more pressing, that which has a more tangible link to us and our immediate surroundings?
I happened to be in a French port town called Granville last week. I came across a small gateway halfway up a set of steep cliff steps leading to one of the town’s most beautiful houses. Between 1940 and 1944, the town was occupied by Nazi Germany. Without knowing for sure, I somehow have no doubt that Nazi officers would have been living inside that beautiful house perched on the cliff – just because they could. In the shadow of the cliffs there is also a grand casino, very much embedded in the history of the town. No doubt this was also a familiar haunt for bored Nazis stationed a thousand kilometres from home.
On top of the gatehouse, are a selection of decorative stones, bricks and finials. They can no doubt tell a few stories, as they say. But the decorative stones on that gateway, covered in mossy growth and standing firm in the face of many a storm, were there long before the Nazi fortifications were cast into the same cliffside and will no doubt still be there, reaching toward the grey sky long after we too cease to walk along those cliff paths.
‘This too shall pass’ they say. It’s a cliché of course, but like all clichés, there is more than a morsel of truth wrapped up in its quotidian exterior.
Fractalis - An ongoing journal 