Yesterday I awoke in Venice. One water taxi, three flights, and one late night car ride are all that separate a 15th- century pensione on the banks of a still-more ancient canal from this late 20th century resort in the Great American Desert. Technology may have shrunk the 8000 miles between them -- but it has not narrowed the centuries that divide them. I left a small medieval town of liquid and shadows, layered with the thick impasto of history, slowly subsiding into the waters of the Adriatic lagoon -- and arrived here in this dazzling modern metropolis bursting upward and outward in the Valley of the Sun.
It took me about 20 hours to go half way around the world - - from Marco Polo Airport to SkyHarbor. But it took that famous traveler, the one who lent his name to his city's airport, about 3 full years to make his way halfway round the world from Kublai Khan's court in China back home to Venice.
It's a truism that technology is making the world a smaller place, it's a truism that technology makes the world run faster. My experience of the past day or so, seems to be just one small piece of evidence of our remarkable ability to transport ourselves across great amounts of space in ever smaller amounts of time.
Yeah, but, tell that to my body -- which feels as if it spent the last 36 hours in a blender. Technology may enable wonders, but the physical realm still has the last laugh.
So why do we do this, why do we show up? I could have sent some thoughts to Steve Gilbert's Listserv [AAHESGIT], I might have made a video for you to watch, but instead -- I'm here today. And you, you might have chosen to look at a web site, or asked your colleagues to fill you in upon their return, but instead -- you're here, too. Because being here still imparts a richer experience. We get something when we show up that we don't when we don't.
Our communication technologies provide us with unprecedented means to connect with people, with places, with data that we would never be able to access in real time and real space. But, I live a life -- probably a lot like your life -- where I find my time increasingly spent dealing with more and more increments of smaller and smaller bits of information -- and the expectation is that I process these bits at an ever faster rate of speed. Too often, lately, the technology seems to be controlling me, instead of the other way around. And this is what I'd like to talk about today. What is the proper balance with real time, real space, real life? When do we show up? And when do we slow down?
I cite two recent incidents. The first was my Father's Day meltdown. My husband was on a business trip, grumpy at missing out on his one and only day of pampering a year. I took my five-year-old son and my seven-year-old daughter into the office to catch up on things since I'd been traveling the previous week and was about to hit the road again the next day.
Because my company has just moved our offices, I'm temporarily without access to our remote email system. So on that gorgeous sunny Sunday I find myself in a cold sweat -- quaking in utter terror at what I would find after two and a half days on the road without email.
I get in, and log on. Up comes the message list, dozens of 'em, scrolling gaily by with tantalizing subject headers, and lots of little urgent icons. I go to open one -- but instead of text, an error message appears -- and like all error messages, bearing a message I have never seen before, and have no idea how to interpret. After the usual fumbling fails to work, I start throwing stuff away to free some memory -- to no avail. I reboot, then re-log into the network, I check my connections, but nothing helps.
Then I pray -- and try everything once, twice, three more times. No good. Get desperate. Leave angry voice mail for the help desk to hear when they arrive Monday morning. Leave pleading notes for assistant to continuously harass the help desk while I'm away.
My stomach is now somersaulting over the prospect of five more days of unread email. My head fills with visions of email rolling in like waves on the beach, piling up inexorably, screen after screen after screen. I pause, to gently remind my children to stop using colored markers directly on the surface of my new white desk or risk defenestration from the 26th floor.
Abandoning all hope of email, I turn to the phone. Pick up messages on voice mail, then disconnect from voice mail. Call my 24-hour travel agent and change flights to accommodate the critical meeting I just learned of on voice mail. My air fare doubles. Realize I haven't reserved a rental car yet for tomorrow, then realize I don't know how to get where I'm going. Wonder how I'll get driving directions before I leave for the airport at 7 AM tomorrow. Anxiety level continues to mount.
Turn my thoughts to this talk. For a few days now, ideas have been circling like buzzards over a dead cow, but nothing has come home to roost. Go back to the computer, pull up Word, stare at blank screen, trying to think of something appropriate to say. About the great myth of technology -- that it saves time. About the real truth of technology -- that it makes it possible to do more things in the same amount of time -- thus raising productivity -- and our blood pressure. About my sometime fear that this digital life is out of balance, that despite all the wonders of this plugged-in world, we may be about to go tilt. But the words won't come.
The screen is still as blank as my mind. Look at the calendar and realize I have only one free day between now and the day I'll deliver this -- Mayday! Mayday! I'm deep in panic mode now. I glance at some notes I've scribbled on the fragmentation of work into ever smaller units, but now the words refuse to cohere. I jot something down about the consequent tessellation of our mental process -- but I can't link that thought to any others.
My internal editor is now in overdrive, shouting ," Say something, say something!" But what can I say? What can I say? My brain has become an atomic collider -- thoughts ricocheting around, bouncing off the walls of my skull, creating more ricochets, perpetual motion, nothing coming to rest. Huge jags of anxiety now -- decide they must be hunger pangs. Look at watch, yep, lunchtime. Somehow the whole morning has been worried away with zero to show for it. I turn off the computer. Extricate children from under my new white desk where they have wedged themselves. Spend the next ten minutes in search of multicolored marker caps to pair with multicolored marker pens. Spend fifteen minutes after that cleaning off multicolored marker marks from my new white desk top. Exhausted by the morning's labors, I exit, in the agony of defeat.
Well, we've all had mornings like that one. But, unfortunately, it 's just a slightly exaggerated version of what's becoming more and more often a normal one. Too often the relentless flow of incoming information sets the tenor and pace of my day. Too often I get through all the email and voicemail , but leave that important conversation with a colleague 'til tomorrow. I worry that processing tidbits all day long may begin to supplant the longer-term, big-picture thinking I need to do. I fear losing what Sven Birkerts, a very smart neo-Luddite critic, calls "the depth experience."
Second incident: Right after Father's Day, I attended a software conference in Atlanta, where I had an all-too-common conversation there, with the president of a online media company. We were setting up a meeting in New York, and I mentioned the dates I'd be out on vacation. "Vacation," he said wistfully, "I barely remember the meaning of the word." In contrast to his, my puny schedule seemed like child's play. What's ironic, though, is that this incredibly plugged-in individual, a walking cornucopia of advanced technology, spends almost all his time on a plane going to meetings. He still needs to be there, too, it seems. We exchanged a few words on the relentless intrusion of the workplace into our personal spheres, then we hurried off to our next appointments.
*****
In the past two weeks that my family and I were on vacation, I ate, and slept, and read books, and visited churches, and saw many paintings, and drank espresso in tiny cafes by the canals of Venice. Now I suppose the days in Italy, are about as long as the ones back home in New York, but as Henry James knew, Italian hours pass differently than others. And though in one way, our two weeks there passed in a heartbeat, in another way, they will live with me always.
I've been thinking about the relativity of time lately -- and how our perception of its pace affects us. What does it mean that for many of us, life seem to be getting faster and faster? And that our experience of individual sensations seems to be getting shorter and shorter? Milan Kundera writing in his recent book, Slowness, says, "Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man."
We gain much in living at hyperspeed: we connect to many people, we touch on many things. And, yet, much too is at risk. As Kundera tells us, "There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory. The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the degree of forgetting."
As I usually do before vacations, I extend my experience of a place by reading about it for months beforehand. So, lately, I've been consuming everything I can get my hands on Italy. But in reading Goethe's Italian Journey, or Henry James' Italian Hours, one can't help but be struck by the unimaginable luxury of slow travel and long voyages that characterize these works. Goethe, for one, set out on his first trip to Italy in September of 1786 and returned to Weimar in June of the following year. A few months after arriving home, he turned right around to spent ten months in Rome.
And leafing through James's account of his time in Venice, I felt my heart wrench in envy reading his words, "...the weather wasn't always fine; the first month was wet and windy..."
But even mere mortals, like us, can pretend to lead lives of leisure, and maybe we should sometimes. My absolute favorite guidebook of all time, entitled, Venice for Pleasure, counsels its reader to by all means see the that Tiepolo ceiling, or that Byzantine arch. But he also urges us to make sure that "doing" Venice doesn't intrude upon the pleasure of being there -- of sitting down in that little Venetian cafe and enjoying an espresso al fresco, taking in the view and musing on the past generations of travelers who have done the same. For it is in the slownesses of our journeys that we come to appreciate why we have made the trip.
Pleasure and slowness -- as that famous Venetian, Casanova, well knew -- are inextricably linked in the sensual realm. But slowness has its place in the life of the mind as well. In these harried days, perhaps we over-value the quick repartee, the lightning wit, the nanosecond calculation, and under-appreciate mental efforts which require a careful, deliberate, and well-considered approach. In other words, those that take time to produce. In our frantic scurrying to pack more and more into each second, are we losing our ability to ponder? And in our zeal for acceleration, are we pushing our minds so relentlessly, that, one day, mule- like, they simply stop and refuse to go farther?
On that Father's Day, after the morning meltdown, I brought my mule-ish brain home from the office, and sat down to write this talk -- and to listen -- to Glenn Gould's first recording of the Goldberg Variations. Bach composed these keyboard exercises in 1742 as an early form of mood music -- expressly to help his patron relax. This aria with 30 variations, though, is no mere antidote to stress -- like all great music -- it moves us, it inspires us, it restores us. But, Bach being Bach, it does much more -- it teaches us about ourselves. Hearing it again that day, I could only agree with Lewis Thomas, who wrote, "We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind." And that day, especially, I needed to learn again that the human mind -- like music -- needs its rests, its intervals, its largos, and its prestos -- ma non troppo. It, we, take shape in the silences. As the pianist Artur Schnabel said "... the pauses between the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides."
*****
One hot June night in 1955, Glenn Gould, then a 22-year-old Canadian pianist, barely known here in the States, sat down in a sweltering New York recording studio and made the sounds you've been hearing. What resulted from this session was to become a classic of music recording. Gould, soon after, gave up the concert stage to devote the rest of his career to recording and radio performances. For him, curiously, it seemed that being there didn't matter so much. In his case, his recordings are what we have of him -- and for this, let us give thanks.
Today, though, we chose to be here -- live -- though perhaps a bit less than live in my case. Again, I wonder, why? One thing face-to-face provides is the chance to dine together -- and that's important because you don't really know someone until you've eaten with him. But, there's something else at work here, too. Real life, I think, gives us the chance to be silent while together, to do nothing -- as a group.
In communications, it seems the less we control the input and the intervals , the more limited the exchange. We all know there is nothing in the world more exhausting than a two-hour conference call with several people on the line. But here, in real time, we exert more control over the amount of sensory input we take in. We can tune in, or out, ask a question, share a laugh, or bag it all and take a walk. Having that range of options seems important to us. And "options" here is the key word.
It is not my intent to inveigh against speed. I can fully embrace the Italian Futurist, Marinetti, who, earlier this century, called speed "the new beauty ... added to the splendor of the world." What I want to call our attention to is undifferentiated, unrelieved, unconscious rapidity. It is that unremitting speed, that constant acceleration with no pauses that emperils us.
And while our century seems particularly in love with -- and at risk from -- celerity, the problem of going too fast for our own good is not a new one . In fact, the best advice on the subject is a Latin proverb from ancient Rome -- Festina lente or "hurry slowly" -- proving once again, that the Italians have something to teach us all. The nation that created both the Ferrari and the Italian postal system must innately understand the pleasure to be found in slowness -- and the delight to be found in speed. Perhaps their immersion in so much history makes Italians especially sensitive to Time. They seem to savor the full range of Time's possibilities -- its crescendi and its dimuendi, its scherzi and its requiems. No wonder Italian is the language of music.
One need not be Italian to comprehend the lesson. But it seems a long visit may help. Just a few years before Napoleon brought its thousand year reign to a humiliating end, Goethe wrote of the most Serene Republic... "Their lagoons may be silting up and unhealthy miasmas hovering over their marshes, their trade may be declining, their political power dwindling, but this republic will never become a whit less venerable in the eyes of [this] one observer. Venice, like everything else which has a phenomenal existence, is subject to Time..." [and] "tho' Time changes everything, men cling to the form of a thing as they first knew it, even when its nature and function have changed."
Well, as the Goncourt brothers wrote, "Time cures one of everything, even living." And time will have the last laugh on us, too, one day. Meanwhile, surely we can agree with Gandhi -- that our life is worth more than just accelerating its pace. So as we whirl 'round each other in our dance to the music of time, perhaps we would do well to stop every so often to remember, to rest, to refresh our spirit. As Kundera reminds us, speed provides ecstasy, but it is in slowness that memory, that beauty, live.
We need them both -- speed and slowness -- but in suitable proportion. And especially in our times, obtaining this balance is difficult, and requires our full consciousness, our full commitment. How might we achieve it?
At my son's kindergarten picnic, another mother told me of a course she took on time management. The instructor wanted to illustrate the point that getting control over one's time wasn't really about efficiency, or about getting organized -- it was about priorities. He placed on a table a pile of big rocks and a glass jar. And he asked the audience, will the all rocks go into the jar? He placed them in one by one -- and they fit. He asked the audience, "Is the jar full?" Well, they thought so, until he began to put in some gravel. "Is it full now?" he asked. Yes, it seemed full . But then he put in some sand, and finally some water. Each time, yeah, the group said, the jar is full. "But the point, you see," said the consultant, "is to fit it all in -- you have to put the big stuff in first."
Sounds so simple, doesn't it? Just decide what's the big stuff -- and put that in first. But as we all know, that decision requires care and attention and deliberation; there are no shortcuts. It just takes time. Italo Calvino, the late, and not surprisingly Italian writer, extends this thought in his astonishing book-- Invisible Cities.
The work, a short meditation on the nature of reality and imagination, takes the form of an extended dialog between Kublai Khan and his esteemed visitor, Marco Polo, that intrepid Venetian traveler. Relaxing in his host's pleasure garden, Marco describes each of the cities he has seen while traveling the Great Khan's empire -- hidden cities, trading cities, cities of desire -- some dazzling, some full of shadows. In the final chapter, our two protagonists contemplate the nature of "the promised lands visited in thought, but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun... " names which resonate with us as we near the next millennium and cast our gaze ahead.
Kublai asks Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us. "
Marco answers: "For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialog of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city towards which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now more scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it; but only in the way I have said."
Already the Great Kahn was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.
He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."
And Polo said: " The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
*****
Glenn Gould, 27 years after his debut recording, returned to the 30th Street Studios in New York once more, to re-record The Goldberg Variations. In 1955, at twenty-two years of age, in 38 minutes and 40 seconds, he gave us a technically dazzling and brilliantly modern interpretation, and in doing so, burst upon the music scene like a sun. The second time, nearing fifty, Gould left us a performance full of liquid and shadows, more darkly layered now with the impasto of his life's history -- and it took him more than 51 minutes to do so. You may ask me which of the two is my favorite, and you could probably guess as to which, but on the whole, I'd say life without either is unthinkable. So today Johann and Glenn will have the last word. And I'll close now, by listening with you to the recapitulation of the aria which concludes this 1981 recording of The Goldberg Variations, made less than a year before Glenn Gould's death.
Steven W. Gilbert, Director, Technology Projects
American Association for Higher Education
202/293-6440 X 54 FAX: 202/293-0073
GILBERT@CLARK.NET
http://www.aahe.org [includes TLTR Web Site]