There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.
Milan Kundera, Slowness
Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Kundera, man. This guy just knows how to pierce into and extend a metaphor.
The question his thoughts inspire in me today is this: when we travel from the present moment to our memories–or an imagined future–does the speed of life around us change? How do we move from our imaginations to our current surroundings? Slowly or with speed?
Slowness
By Jill Szoo Wilson
A breeze blows through my window
proclaims,
"I wants to write,"
as it lifts the pages of my notepad–
the crinkling sound of paper–
no–
the sound of pages running across a sidewalk
though no footsteps follow behind.
Free, the pages tumble
twist into a roll–
double back salto tucked with a triple twist–
a pigeon holds up a sign,
"7 out of 10."
It had to be the pigeon.
No one else was paying attention.
The fluttering of the notebook page
pulls me back into the moment–
how many sounds have I forgotten to hear?
Do I hear the past
more loudly than today?
How many hours echo through a chamber of disparate chatter?
A dog is barking,
a squirrel's claws are tapping the inside of my ceramic pot,
I'm humming a song that was sung to me once,
the pigeon is bored–
he flys away.
©Jill Szoo Wilson, 2023
Necessary Whispers 