The Discovery of Slowness

by Sten Nadolny

Large animals, John thought, move more slowly than mice and wasps. Perhaps he was secretly a giant.

A few months ago they had gotten lost on a ramble through the woods. Only he, John, had observed the gradual changes, the position of the sun, the rising of the ground—he knew how to get back.

“That’s a jellied dish,” said the hostess. “Head cheese, made of pig’s head. It’ll give you strength.”

Now he no longer wanted to be quick.

“Don’t run away again! You can become a sailor. But you’re a bit too caught up in thought, so you must become an officer or your life will be hell. Try to make it through school until I come back.

I’ll still send you some books about navigation. And I’ll take you on as a midshipman on my ship.”

“Against cascara rind no bad blood can win out.”

It usually seemed a little tense, for anyone who is always present for everybody has little time.

If anyone else had said it, John wouldn’t have understood the new word, but the Dutchman knew that his listener understood everything when he was allowed pauses.

Whatever else he saw must have been lit up before and now shone only within his own eye—a light of the past.

Nettles were growing on Fielding’s grave, as on the graves of all people who had amounted to something in life. That this was so John knew from the shepherd in Spilsby.

So he had been wrong. John was relieved. He had asked his question. The answer was negative; that was all right. He took it to be a hint that now he really had to decide in favor of the sea. Now he wanted ocean and war.

The hair on his back, originally of even density, had adjusted itself to the landscape and formed small groves and clearings.

“John’s eyes and ears,” Dr. Orme wrote to the captain, “retain every impression for a peculiarly long time. His apparent slowness of mind and his inertia are nothing but the result of exaggerated care taken by his brain in contemplating every kind of detail. His enormous patience…”

And everyone had a name and moved about.

And while the veteran sailors were feverish or frozen, John experienced one of those moments that belonged to him, for he could ignore the fast events and noises and turn to changes which, in their slowness, were barely perceptible to others.

red-headed English girls were among the eight or ten reasons why it was worthwhile to keep one’s eyes open.

In his mind, ‘one single concern began to crowd out all others. It grew and grew. It surpassed all boundaries. It exploded. The man could pull the trigger at once and kill him, sending him to death or to perish slowly from gangrene.

And he continued to hope that the slowness of women had something to do with his own.

John would have even taken log line and hourglass into the bunk with him at night if he had been able to measure how quickly a man slept or how far he could travel in his dreams.

The longer a person talked, the more often Denis interrupted him to assure him he had understood.

He could see and hear reefs in time, for he never did or thought about two things simultaneously.

Westall replied: “His impression! What is strange, or at least what is strange within the familiar.”

Every report had its external aspect, which hung together logically and was easy to grasp, and an internal one, which would light up only inside the speaker’s head.

What is beautiful is not the physical construction of things but what eye and mind made of it.

“Something occurs to me about forgetting,” said John. “I fell in love with a woman and slept with her, but even now her face escapes me completely.”

As he had anticipated, he was now respected. He was consulted on important matters and was given time to respond. One can’t accomplish more, he thought. Only one error remained: the war.

He couldn’t be at odds with himself. He had to subdue his rage, allow his fear to subside, and suppress his disgust with his conscious will, and to stop all of this took time.

“It’s got him!” exclaimed the boatswain. “No, I did,” said John.

“I now speak of seeing; forgive me. But it all hangs together because of that. There are two kinds: an eye for details, which discovers new things, and a fixed look that follows only a ready-made plan and speeds it up for the moment. If you don’t understand me, I can’t say it any other way. Even these sentences gave me a lot of trouble.”

He gave orders the way a carpenter drives nails, each straight and deep until it held.

“Things aren’t any easier for him than before,” Captain Walker said through his teeth, “but suddenly he has pulled himself together. He knows what he can and what he can’t do. That’s half the job.”

“Nobody has been at the North Pole yet!” Since the sun did not set there in the summer he was sure of two things: there would be open water and time without hours and days.

All of London seemed to be in love with speed.

“Mr. Franklin,” she said, “that was too fast for me.”

Every place was called slow if posts rarely went there.

The Origin of the Individual through Speed OR: Observations for Distinct Time Senses which GOD Planted within each Individual as Represented in an Outstanding Example

Clearly, the artists were the weakest point.

For a grown man the country was actually pleasant.

“In the study of history, slowness is an advantage. The scholar decelerates the fast-moving events of past days until his mind can fathom them. Then, however, he can demonstrate to the rashest king how he should have acted in battle.”

“Do you know what I like about you, Mr. Franklin? With most people everything moves fast until they understand, but when they get to the point it’s already over. You’re different. Join us in our fight; it’s your human duty!”

There remained only the escape into quickness. Someone was “better” if he could do the same thing faster. And this choice was not open to him.

He had to become a captain! To find the Pole! He’d worry again about the land after that.

Mr. Roget hesitated. “Actually, Sir Joseph wanted to tell you himself. You—will take over a ship in Deptford and go to the North Pole.”

They will perish only when they have destroyed everything.

“I destroy nothing,” Hood replied quietly. “I don’t want to leave traces behind. At most a few pictures.”

As long as there was the sea, the world was not wretched.

This was not how they had imagined the Arctic coast. They had expected not this dead silence but seals and walruses on ice floes and rocks and polar bears swaying over hills, cliffs full of auks and other large birds, a fiery sea of red flowers—music for the eye.

Clocks and people had become more precise. John would have welcomed this if the result had been greater calm and deliberation, but instead he observed everywhere only time pressure and haste.

Reaching for one’s watch chain had become a more frequent move than reaching for one’s hat. One hardly heard curses anymore; the exclamation “No time!” had taken their place.