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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #61 - The One True Manifesto of Slow
08.25.10
One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement
and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be
drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.
It's a bike ride.
Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.
It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm
at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
We'll endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight).
On this bike ride, you might expect:
- full moon picnics
- inconvenient passageways
- "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- karaoke
- geocaching
- oblique strategies
- Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
- rivers that no longer exist
- smell tourism
- Couchwick v2.0
Furthermore:
- 20-30 miles (probably less this week)
- a medium pace (but slow this week)
- few stops, short stops
- but we're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light
- be not afraid of hills
- victory donuts!
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This week:
THE ONE TRUE MANIFESTO OF SLOW
THE CENTURY OF SPEED AND SWIFTNESS
We hereby declare that the 20th century was the century of speed, of swiftness, of get
your booty on and move. We likewise hereby declare that the first decade of the 21st
century was also 1/10 a century of speed, of swiftness, of get your booty on and
move. We furthermore hereby likewise declare, having will had written this in the year
2013, that the first year of the second decade of the 21st century was 1/100 of a
century of speed, of swiftness, of get your booty on and move.
Therefore, we declare, in manifesto form, a movement against speed and swiftness.
Let the adjectival form of this movement be known as SLOW. In observance of the
fact that other movements have already rushed to claim this adjective SLOW—to wit,
slow food, slow reading, slow information, slow media—and in observance of the fact
that in their haste to claim this adjective these supposed movements have proven
themselves to be anything but slow, let this manifesto henceforth be The One True
Manifesto of Slow.
Moreover, given what will turn out in 2097 to be the long history of these failed
movements, let us declare that up to and including now, these various slow
movements have missed the point of slowness. The value of slowness, of
deliberation, of reflection, of listless contemplation and purposeless reverie, lies not
in preparing meals more slowly, not in reading more slowly, not in consuming more
slowly media designed to be consumed more slowly. The one true aim of slowness
is to ride more slowly. This nearly unachievable goal, the pursuit of which is made
all the more worthwhile for its elusiveness, is the goal of Slow Riding.
SLOW IS THE OPPOSITE OF LESS SLOW
We, the manifestoers, have studied this issue for years and have conclusively
proven, though not without some pause, that slow riding is the opposite of less
slow riding. As the world is full of less slow riding, achieved at a frenzied pace by
riders who ride less slowly, we take it as a challenge to ride slow and to ride slowly.
Slow riding is riding that is savored for every pedal turned, every inch advanced.
Slow riding is not easy riding. Slow riding requires patience and determination. Slow
riding requires sustained moments of near-stillness, of nothingness, of blank stares
into the distance. To do anything more would be to taint the trickling thrust of body
and machine that defines slow riding.
SLOW IS INFINITELY DIVISIBLE
A speed such as slow is always divisible by half, and every half is divisible again by
half. Those who ride slowly must now ride twice as slowly and half as fast. If you
halve your riding speed you need only to halve it once again to be halfway to riding
an eighth less fast. The divide between the halves and halves not is the divide
between the acutely slow and the chronically prolific. It is the divide between slow
riding savored for every inch yet untraveled and fast riding hurried ahead in the face
of a deadline. Let it be said, what everyone knows is true, that the world despises
the prolific, while the slow will inherit the keys to the kingdom of the Here and the
There and all the inches in between.
SLOW IS THE FUTURE
This One True Manifesto of the Slow, written in the century of speed and swiftness
and get your booty on and move, is itself a product of a slowness that has neared
to stillness. Years it has taken to write. Only in the year 2013 will it have had been
finished. And only in the year 2097 will traversal across past and present have been
perfected, allowing Time Couriers to deliver this message to you, now, just shy of
the first year of the second decade of the 21st century. Read it and heed it well. We
who must write must ride slowly in order to ride at all. The present is littered with the
brittle bones of those who have finished their riding, those who have had their ride,
those who have ridden less slowly. The future meanwhile belongs to those of us who
have not finished what we have started. Our time has not yet come, because our
destination has not yet been reached.
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Bring your low gears, friends.
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For more information about this week's ride, join our mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/the-passage-announcements
For more information about past rides, visit our website:
http://www.TheRoyalAcademy.org/Passage
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Discuss
Certain shifting angles,
certain receding perspectives.
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