It’s March 29th – the end is near. This means I’ve reached my monthly limit of free articles on those Internet publications I tend to frequent. Even taking into account Private Mode and multiple browser sessions and all the other tricks I use to try to avoid paying for a subscription, I’m almost done. Finished. Kaput.
“Almost,” I said. Lucky for you, I came across this one just in the nick of time. It’s a simply lovely piece, by an author who shall remain nameless – and I’m not giving you the name of the publication either – unless you choose to click the link and read it for yourself in full. The reason for this evasion has nothing to do with my innate urge to plagiarize. Rather, it has to do with the annoying tendency among some of my subscribers to reject certain things out of hand, based solely on the source, not on content. This tendency I find inexplicable, but there you have it.
The article’s here (if you really must know). Excerpts are below (if you, like me, are pressed for time). The subtitle is “A small rebellion against the quickening of time.” This I find much preferable to the headline, which I’m also not mentioning here because I find the word “cleanse” distasteful. And that is true even when it doesn’t refer to human bowel function. So sue me.
The article begins with a painting, and a nod to Japanese ceramics:
The two most recent times I saw my friend Makoto Fujimura, he put a Kintsugi bowl in my hands. These ceramic bowls were 300 to 400 years old. But what made them special was that somewhere along the way they had broken into shards and were glued back together with a 15th-century technique using Japanese lacquer and gold.
They look like they have golden veins running through them. This makes them more beautiful and more valuable than they were in their original condition. There’s a dimension of depth to them. You sense the original life they had, the rupture and then the way they were so beautifully healed. And of course they stand as a metaphor for the people, families and societies we all know. Those who have endured their own ruptures and come back beautiful, vulnerable and whole in their broken places.
By contrast, the Internet these days is quite a different matter:
There is a rapid, dirty river of information coursing through us all day. If you’re in the news business, or a consumer of the news business, your reaction to events has to be instant or it is outdated. If you’re on social media, there are these swarming mobs who rise out of nowhere. They leave people broken and do not stick around to perform the patient Kintsugi act of gluing them back together…. I’ve felt a great need to take a break from this pace every once in a while and step into a slower dimension of time. Mako’s paintings are very good for these moments.
The article takes a bit of a detour to include philosophical concepts like Greek “Kairos” and Hebrew “Shabbat.” The point of both is to illustrate that there are longstanding historical alternatives to our current experience of daily life at a frenetic Internet pace.
The article concludes this way:
Mako has the sorts of thoughts one has when you live at a different pace…. There’s an ambiguity, complexity and sometimes a hiddenness to his writing and speech that can’t be expressed as a hot take… It is an argument against the whole idea of a culture war. It advocates an environmental movement for the culture — replacing the harsh works that flow from fear with works that are generous, generative and generational….
That last word is a breath from another age. What would it mean to live generationally once in a while, in a world that now finds the daily newspaper too slow?