In Praise of Slow | a Review
originally published on 03/05/2022;
Hello, humans, I am G.E.M.Simov, a slow fellow that takes his time with almost everything. This is going to be a pseudo review, pseudo essay on the book “In Praise of Slow” by Carl Honoré (henceforth simply ‘the book’) .
While I will attempt to review this book in the following fashion, I do not think this one is going to be a ‘review’, in the same sense that other book reviews of mine have been ‘reviews’, because of the fact that this isn’t a novel, it’s different. Yet it still possesses a story, and, as a result of that, I will make use of the following outline:
I'll be rating it on a 10/10 scale, with 3 points awarded per category, of which there will be three, and a final point that I will give out if I found the book touching in some sense. The three categories are: "Content", "Richness of Expression" and "Story".
Content
Conveniently enough, for the purposes of this review, the book turns out to be quite convenient. It is split up into a number of chapters, with the first being an introduction to the concept of ‘fast’ and ‘slow’, mainly focused on ‘fast’, while the second chapter is a more in-depth look at ‘slow’. The following chapters are all focused on certain things that could be done in a ‘slow’ manner, and how doing them so could improve the lives of people.
This spread of content, in the book, is quite well done. Not only that, but there’s a very interesting manner in which every chapter begins, as they are all accompanied by a quote from some famous individual, which quote relates to the topic of discussion in the chapter, most often seemingly in support of the arguments made towards the ‘slow’ approach.
There are, however, a few strange things. The book starts off with almost four pages of glowing reviews OF it. That’s… That’s, at the very least, tasteless, and at most an outstandingly stupid move on the part of whoever published this edition. The fact that books, in our current day and age, make it a monstrously overwhelming habit to use reviews instead of a summary, when talking about a book, is horrible. I want to read what the book is about, not how some schmuck describes the book! I don’t care about his or her experience with it, especially before reading it myself, I want to look at THE BOOK! What’s it about, tell me!
Fortunately, the trappings aren’t too great, as the back of the book features only ONE review, as well as an intriguing blurb pertaining to what the book is about. That’s good, but the sheer fact that the first four pages of the book are literally just reviews, and the book is just tooting its own horn before we’ve gotten to see it in action, is just unnerving. Bad form, I’d say.
Another strange thing that the book does is feature a different font for the first few words of the initial sentence in each chapter. These are not bad, but they’re pointless. Why is it that the first few words are such? Why is it not just the first letter, as was done in the stereotypical fairytale book? Why was it not just the first word, instead of a number of words? Is it meant to be a way of underlining what is being said, to emphasize its importance? I doubt that, as some are very unimportant. For me, that ruins the cohesion of the appearance of the text, and that lessens the experience.
However, there doesn’t seem much else I can scoff at disapprovingly. There’s a perfectly good table of contents at the start of the book, the cover is simple and features a funky visual call-back to the turtle and the hare, which is a story most everyone knows, pertaining to going fast and going slow, and why going slow could be better.
When it comes to content, I really have no major complaints, as there’s a number of pages dedicated to listing the source for many of the claims made within the book, there’s a dedicated section with notes and even an Index. Very good stuff. 3/3
Richness Of Expression
So, apparently, Carl Honoré is a journalist. Color me impressed, because he seems to be very capable! The thing is that his manner of approaching this vast set of topics that he covers - many of which can easily lead him down a rabbit hole of academic jargon relating to each specific topic - is surprisingly similar.
What I mean to say here is that he approaches the topic of food and the culinary arts in the same manner as he approaches health care and medicine. One of those aforementioned things is a lot more academic in nature, and yet Carl’s manner retains a very worldly, might I say, secular feeling. It is evident that he has had a lot of time to work on his craft - on his expression - and he has managed to glean a great propensity for clarity, but a clarity not bogged down by the simplicity usually associated with it.
Whereas the bad kind of simple comes in and is, in its own right, and by definition, clear, the good kind of simple comes in even when the thing spoken of is very complex. As an example, I’d like to present a decent amount of this book - it covers topics that one would describe as increasingly more complex - even dipping into things that some incredibly mouthy individuals stutter when asked about - yet said topics are all covered in a very reasonable manner.
Everything that is mentioned, that is presented, is clear. It might lack conciseness, but that lack does not take away from the quality of the reading experience. Not only that, but I found myself encountering a vast number of words that were very scintillating for my metaphorical taste buds. I like it when I see words that one doesn’t see often. New ones are a magnificent thing for me. Imagine my great pleasure when a person, natively an english speaker, who has been dealing with an incredible number of people, talking to them, reading things from them, and so on, decides to write a book of his own. That great lexicon housed within that person, Carl’s, mind seeps out onto the pavement, as if it were the contents of a candy van whose back door was broken open, and all the children (me) rush to grab some sweets.
Elation. In fact, so impressed I was by the lovely means through which Carl expressed himself, that I almost got carried away at a few points, and might have missed the opportunity to disagree with what was being stated, or maybe I would have failed to make any associations, simply because of the trans-like state I found myself experiencing whilst reading.
Consider - I might be heaping praise upon this book in such a bombastic way, yet that does not mean I am entirely enchanted by it. Sure, it was a wonderfully pleasant read - if one abstracts themselves from the topic of discussion - but as soon as we start considering what was being spoken of, the pleasure drops increasingly quickly.
I’d like to inform the reader that this book was first published in 2004. It is 2022, as of the writing of this review, and all those things mentioned in the book are, still, out of the norm, fringe–
I should save that for later, shouldn’t I? It isn’t connected to the richness of Carl’s expression, though the latter did do wonders in almost keeping me from acknowledging the severity of the former. Thus, I can’t, in good conscience, not award the highest grade I can give! 3/3
Story
This book is about a father who realizes that he isn’t living right, due to the fact that he unironically considers becoming acquainted with One-Minute-Bedtime-Stories to read to his son, instead of reading him actual stories, and then goes on a globe-trotting adventure to slow down.
Over the course of his journey, he does a lot of self reflection, recognizes the ‘Age of Rage’ (a phenomenal concept, if I do say so myself), visits Italy to eat slowly and see slow cities, visits the US to see a walkable city (quite unusual for any settlement in the USA), visits Germany to listen to very slow music, learns about tantric sex and finally figures out how to take it slow.
Of course, the main issue of this book is the dichotomy between going ‘fast’ and going ‘slow’. Modern society, according to Carl (or the believers in the ‘Slow’ movement), is going too fast, and it is only speeding up. That was 2004. In 2022, the world is going at least two times faster, while the ‘Slow’ movement is nowhere to be seen.
See, here’s the thing: Carl did not tell me anything new, because I’ve read Aristotle, and I know about the Golden Mean. I know about the value of balancing between two extremes - slow and fast, in this case - and I know that all of life is a balancing act between two extremes. Naturally, life is best when you strike the balance and reach the Golden Mean - it is golden, well, because gold was very valuable back then, and it still is quite valuable.
The problem with a lot of what Carl says - that the movement is gaining ground and is going to get rolling - is misled. Naturally, we do have the information highway that is the internet, and it has only sped up ever since 2004, but that does not mean that the ideas we bring to the table are going to be even noticed.
The world goes much faster now, and these good ideas that Carl presents in the book are buried under mountains of other ideas, some worse, some as good, some maybe even better. But the main issue is that he is hopeful, he believes that we, the members of humanity, will be able to reach a point of slowing down en masse. How, though? Through the spread of the idea of slowness? Dear reader, Carl seems to have completely disregarded many of the things that he points at in his own book, it seems, in favor of being hopeful.
The issues that create the need for the ‘slow’ movement are all rooted in the speed at which the world is moving. They’re rooted in ‘the fast’. In fact, they are the status quo. If you’re not happy with the way things are, you’re not normal - which is addressed by Carl in the chapter relating to slowing down in the workplace. Unfortunately, that does not extend exclusively to the workplace. As soon as you start feeling unwell, your first thought is that something is wrong, and that something is wrong with YOU.
Then, of course, the exercises described by Carl are performed, but the person feeling unwell is not going to always reach the destination of ‘slow’. See, here’s the problem - Carl mentions charlatans. He mentions opportunists, but only in passing. Yet there they are, Carl, the opportunists. Are we not flooded under a mountain of self-help books, each offering us to solve our problems, only for us to realize that our problems are not, actually, getting solved?
Are we not listening to hundreds of self-help gurus, are we not getting lifestyles shoved down our throats by the stars in society or the workplaces that we dwell in? The slow movement, with its proclivity to lay back and do things at its own pace, at a reasonable pace, is prone for failure in this world, because engaging in any one of the aspects of the ‘slow’ movement requires certain prerequisites that can only be reached via engagement in the ‘fast’ of the world.
Now, here I am, spouting critique of the book, when I haven’t sung its praises. Unfortunately, dear reader, I already did. I said that this book is, essentially, a drawn out description of the Golden Mean, though one that is laser focused on the way people use their time. I am incredibly glad that I sat down to read this book, if only because it reaffirmed many of my personal beliefs, but there isn’t much else I can say about it.
Yes, it is imperative that changes be made to the way things are, but that has been the case for hundreds of years, by this point. The fact that yet another voice pipes up to say: ‘we need to make a change’ didn’t change anything, unfortunately.
Alright, before we truly get rolling, and I start expressing my great sorrow at the state of the world, and its apparent continued being as such, I’ll focus on each chapter, a bit, if there’s anything I feel a great need to say about the topic at hand.
Fortunately, chapters 1 and 2 are going to be skipped over, as they are simply describing the concepts of ‘fast’ and ‘slow’. Chapter 3 shows up and presents food. Food is an incredibly special thing in the life of any human being - as is stated by Carl - but it seems as though there’s something very strange that Carl does.
He puts food, or rather the eating of food, slowly, on a pedestal. A pedestal that claims there’s no need for the addition of other things in its vicinity, yet the addition of certain things is very good. Case and point - eating food with a friend, and having a conversation with them, is very good, especially if that takes a while and you fail to recognize the passage of time. Eating food and watching TV is very bad, even if that takes a while and you fail to recognize the passage of time.
The point made is that one needs to focus on the food they are eating, to appreciate its texture, its taste, the spices, the warmth or lack thereof, for after an hour of eating the same thing, it would have definitely grown cool. This necessity for focus is valuable - after all, being able to appreciate these things is something that requires the abstraction from most, if not all, other things.
However, enjoying one’s meal with a friend, and conversing at length, seems to take away from that focus… Unless the conversation is unsatisfying, maybe even unpleasant, in which case taking part in that conversation maybe is not good - in the simplest sense - as it doesn’t bring one pleasure, which is the point of doing things slowly?
What I’m addressing here is the apparent contradiction - one can be focused on a conversation they’re having, and simultaneously experience all the good qualities of the food they are eating, YET one can NOT be focused on TV while simultaneously experiencing all the goodness of their food?
I eat food. That’s not meant to be a great revelation. However, I‘d like to say that I eat food and derive such sensational pleasure from it that, if one were to consider the feelings experienced by yours truly whilst eating, one would dub me a pervert and flee at the sight of my glorious visage. I do this ‘slow’ eating that Carl presents in his book, and I take great pleasure in doing that.
How can one not, frankly? A bowl of bean stew, having been bubbling over the stove just a moment ago, steaming enticingly before me, the faint scent of mint swirling about the pronounced aroma of the beans themselves, when paired with salami sliced into cubes and fetta cheese crushed up in the broth, is so enchanting that I find myself taken to a whole new realm of wonder. Coupling that magnificent dish with a plain piece of bread, the variety of which matters not, I am left in what one could describe as Nirvana.
The act of consumption is bliss, as the warmth of the bean stew drowns out every other sensation, only to slowly give way to the rich taste. I bite from my slice of bread, before having chewed at all, and merge the two into a dazzling dance of texture and taste that has no equal.
Conversely, I happen to do that while my eyes are glued to the screen of my TV, and I am describable as ‘busy’, watching a random show or a video on YouTube, totally transfixed by the content on display, yet incapable of abstracting myself from the joy of my meal. Am I, then, not eating ‘slowly’ in the correct fashion?
I dare say that I am not. I’d argue that I am eating exceedingly slowly, as many people have noted, and even wondered: “How can you eat so slowly? It’s impressive!” they have told me. I tell them I enjoy my food, and I do my own thing. Yet, I think neither Carl, nor the ‘slow’ movement, would rag on me for doing other things while eating. After all, the very essence of the slow movement is to take time for oneself, to enjoy the moment and to savor it. Am I not savoring the moment as I smack my lips with an oafish grin on my face, caused by the quality of my meal?
I’d say that the issue herein is that Carl’s manner, albeit almost perfect, lacks one thing, and that is the invitation, for the reader, to experiment. There is no explicit disclaimer that the way Carl describes concepts, such as ‘slow food’, are not the end-all, be-all of the ‘slow food’. It seemed, to me, as though there was an indirect insinuation that urged the reader into a rigid view of things - either you do this, and you are a ‘slow foodie’, or you do the opposite, and you aren’t.
Later on in the book, Carl clarifies that ‘one size fits all’ is a terrible approach to doing things, but he never seems to address the apparent oneness of the size that he might be arguing in favor of.
One thing I’d like to point out, other than the fact that eating slowly (ala cooking one’s own meals and taking the time to savor them) is not expensive, is that Carl does something splendid. He simply nips the dreaded ‘takeaway’ culture, which seems to have been problematic even in 2004, in the bud. It is 2019, I am a student in Britain, and I buy myself a bag of beans for, say, 4 Pounds. I will proceed to cook it and have dinner for almost a week. My flatmate, on the other hand, proceeds to order Domino’s Pizza, for the 3rd time this week. That’s nearly 20 Pounds for a single dinner. I vividly remember him telling me that he is ‘in the red’, yet here he is, eating pizza, instead of buying himself products and cooking the food.
And I come to the realization that the UK, as with most other Western Countries, is suffering from a major case of: “I don’t know how to do this, and even if I did, it is far easier to do the other thing”
That will come up later, but let’s distance ourselves from it for the moment. Carl does a good thing with almost all of the chapters - where he presents ‘slow’ things, he also presents reasons as to why they may not be that good. Counter points, if you will. That is incredibly valuable, as it helped me consider whether or not things have changed in the 18-or-so years since the book was written.
Then, there’s the point of cities, and the need to make them slow. I can not say anything bad about that chapter - if only my burst of laughter at the fact that Carl essentially describes the citizens of the USA discovering walkable cities, while European people have always had that. It’s astounding how dreadful the situation in the USA is.
It is even more troubling that nothing seems to have truly changed, and how the prevalence of the car has only grown. It has not been stifled or slowed down, it has not done anything but become more and more encompassing. Even the walkable cities of Europe still feel as though they are far more car than pedestrian.
Another thing - I was impressed by the fact that the city Carl lists as an example of a walkable city, a ‘slow’ city in the US, features something that I know as a ‘charshiya’. The translation for that is never going to be accurate, not in English, as such a concept simply doesn’t seem to exist as its own word in that language, but what Google offered me was ‘Bazaar’. I’d translate it as a ‘merchant street’, if it were up to me, but Bazaar does work wonders.
The countries in South-Eastern Europe, those that fell under Ottoman rule way back when, and subsequently popped out of the bulging carcass of the Ottoman Empire shortly before its collapse, all have THAT. The main street of the town, the sides of which are flanked by the stores of the craftsmen who live there, which street is meant for walking down. There’s establishments, such as real restaurants, bistros, if you will, bars, cafés - everything - and it was a thing more than 200 years ago. How did that get figured out so long ago, and only now the US is starting to pick up, I can’t tell.
The city built around the car is a terrible thing. Horrible UX and design, too, but let’s not get going in that direction.
Now, here’s another gripe I have with this book. Carl, in his pursuit of making things interesting, always makes things cringe-worthy, unbearable, even, when the topic of discussion ends up headed to the East. Anything that comes up, he always seems to straddle with the stereotypes, the worst ones, and then he also adds pointless spiritual affections to it, whenever he describes it.
That’s not good, I reason. It is especially bad when we get to the chapter surrounding meditation. That one almost felt like a parody advertisement in favor of doing yoga or chi-gong. Exactly the way Carl describes this ‘New-Age’ approach to things, how he seemingly pokes fun at it, he then goes on to take part in it. Assigning spiritual meaning to things, talking about the chakras or the energies of certain things - that, to me, is beyond stupid, especially when one’s work is backed up with such a broad number of studies.
The fact of the matter is that meditation, in this book, is meant to serve as a means of calming down. There are some other tidbits, about focusing on oneself and going on a self-discovery course - something that, for yours truly, is totally needless, for reasons that will be revealed in due time - but the purpose of meditation is to calm down and to relax, as a result of which you, the meditating person, start thinking.
See, here’s the problem - it’s rigid. It’s far, far too rigid. To enter this calm state, you must meditate, you must stop doing everything else and just meditate. The ultimate purpose of meditation - breathing exercises - is to become so capable that you do it WITHOUT thinking about it. The fact that people meditate by secluding themselves, by distancing themselves completely, in search of abstraction from everything, is indicative of the fact that they cannot do it by themselves and need help. Meditating, breathing in a certain manner, is a skill that gets perfected as time goes on, and the point at which you stop meditating consciously and start doing it unconsciously is when you become capable of truly meditating.
It shouldn’t be just an: “Okay I’m gonna meditate from now until then!”, it should be: “I’m constantly in a state of meditation!” The whole idea of meditation that is presented in the book is the goal of distancing oneself from time, from the clock’s dominion over you. How, then, could Carl not glean this understanding that meditation, the way he describes it, is incredibly inefficient, because it is bound to the clock, to time? It is so transient that it fails to do everything else, other than momentarily calm the one making use of it down.
I’m not going to get too upset over this, but this is a very simple thing that I figured should have been in the book by default. Picking out a SPECIFIC time and place to meditate - that’s not really going ‘slow’, that’s ‘pretending to be going slow’ within the confines of going ‘fast’.
The complaint pertaining to the manner in which Eastern practices are presented through the prism of spirituality also comes in the following chapter, on medicine, but we know the solution - Golden Mean, combine the two types of medicine, don’t overdo it and you’ll be better off than you were before!
When it comes to the chapter on sex, I found it a tad unpleasant to read, even if it was relatively interesting. It seems, to me, as though the problem haunting people is not that they do the sex ‘too fast’, but, rather, they do it ‘too selfishly’ - especially in the case of the ones with the poking stick. That, on the other hand, is an issue that’s not gonna get solved by ‘slowness’, because it is an issue with the very nature of humanity, or what people like to dub the nature of humanity.
School and work are the next things, and I’ll tackle them almost at once, even if they are separate chapters. School is exactly what that one parent supposedly said it was - it’s preparation for work. It is work, but for kids. The Romanticism of the 19th century pointed at the issue - the child was treated as a small adult. The issue is still the same, though it is a bit different. Now, the child is treated as an adult that needs to learn how to adult, that is not yet an adult.
In reality, the child is an incredibly different, and separate, creature from the adult, but we shan’t get into that. The point here is simple. The child is still treated, more or less, as a type of adult, though not a finished one. And, due to the fact that unfinished things need to be finished, we’re finishing the adult by making the unfinished adult do things that make it an adult. And what makes an adult? Well, an adult is independent from his mother and father and he goes to work, spending his entire life working.
So, the child does adult things - develops insane independence at an early age and works (by going to school to study). The threat that is presented to the child, the reason as to why it should go to work (school) is that, if it does not do that, it will not live well and will not be happy. The same applies to the adult - he goes to work, because if he does not, he will not live well (or at all) and thus he won’t be happy.
Most of the things driving people to force themselves, when going to work, are listed by Carl. The problems are pointed out, though the solution offered addresses them in a very roundabout way. See, Carl doesn’t seem to be vocally against capitalism. He seems to be against the current iteration of capitalism, which isn’t much, granted, but it is something.
So, his idea of solving the problems, which mostly stem from the way the almost perfect implementation of capitalism (currently in effect) has conditioned society to be, is to make people go ‘slow’, which, if adopted by all people, will, in turn, make capitalism go ‘slow’, and make it so all the great troubles pertaining to ‘line goes up’ or ‘acceleration’ are going to suddenly dissipate. That’s very wishful thinking, Carl, but I admire your perception that capitalism, as a concept, is not bad, but, rather, the problem is that bad (as in imperfect) people are running the show.
But here’s another thing that bothers me. Capitalism is all about making a product, right? Well, schools are factories - they’re making people, or, rather, future workers - thus schools operate as does any factory. Quality over quantity. So solving the school issue is impossible before solving the work issue, and solving the work issue, as stated by Carl, is probably not going to happen.
Thus, the problems of the school - which come as a result of the things that capitalism really likes, such as Standardization - come from the solutions implemented to make capitalism ‘not as bad’, which solutions, in this case, mean ‘quality control’. The standardization of schools aims to make it easier for everyone to know how high the quality of a worker(person) is. If different schools had different grading systems, then it would be very hard to know how high the quality of a worker is, and, thus, make it harder to figure out how much money that worker should be paid. In short - what the market value of that worker(person) is.
So not having standardized testing, deadlines, and brutal fact cramming would make it hard on everything else, except school. Thus we can’t have stuff that isn’t standardized. The solutions presented by Carl in the book are, mostly, good - safe for homeschooling. More on that in a little bit, but there’s an issue - the betterment of schools, the fact that they were, supposedly, becoming more reasonable, is something totally foreign. I’ve gone through school, and I’ve interacted with students in school, and the experience is the same - it’s the bad one, where you learn something, get tested, and you need to do that for 20+ different subjects.
That wondrous new thing that Carl spoke of, these Steiner schools? They’ve had almost 20 years to spread, and they’re nowhere to be seen. I know my evidence is anecdotal, but that’s all I’ve got, and that's what most people, me included, base everything off of IF they’re not doing a scientific paper or an academic text.
The way Carl describes things is incredibly hopeful, but now, almost 20 years later… I think he had no reason to be so hopeful. I mean, Aristotle’s Golden Mean has existed for more than 2000 years, and look at humanity go, existing as though the Golden Mean is nothing.
One last thing - the way Carl speaks of Globalization doesn’t really tickle my fancy. I can’t quite describe it, but it seems to me as though he’s not a fan of the concept, even if he admits there are some benefits here and there. That bias appears to seep through the text, although it is concealed, in a sense. That’s a bit fishy.
But let’s jump onto the home-schooling issue. In short - you can’t have home-schooling for the same reasons you can’t have good capitalism - the people doing it are not good, they’re not perfect. The parents homeschooling their kids either need to swap work for figuring out how to do teaching, or they need to go ‘fast’. That’s bad, right? In addition, whenever people do homeschooling, the thing that Carl mentioned as if in passing, or the purpose of raising said kids with religious or moral values of a SPECIFIC variety - is what’s the problem.
Even if the parent is well meaning, the fact is that the child encounters far more viewpoints, far more entities with AUTHORITY, when going to school. When every subject features a different teacher, the child learns naturally that no one person holds all the authority, and thus has the capacity to question it. When all authority is vested in one person - the parent doing the teaching - then the child grows up to consider it totally natural for someone to hold boundless power over them.
Maybe that’s being too harsh, but there’s a far more pronounced respect, even idolization, of authority, which is, to put it as lightly as possible, dangerous. Let’s not even mention the fact that a parent might have biases towards certain facts, pertaining to whether or not said facts actually are factual or not.
In the end, though, these bad things that I pointed at are not truly too bad. There’s a lot of good in this book, even if it did me no good, due to the fact that I had already grasped this good in previous encounters with reality. I quite liked it, and the story ends with Carl finally reading his son stories until the little lad falls asleep, spent. 2/3
Legendary Point
Does this borderline self-help book that effectively regurgitates wisdom from more than 2500 years ago get the Legendary Point? Does this book that so eloquently shows me that it matters not how successful a movement or a piece of literature is, nothing can be done to avert the deadly course of 21st century hyper-capitalism, get the Legendary Point?
No. “In Praise of Slow” does not get the point, mainly because of the fact that I find myself incredibly jaded and simply saddened beyond reproach by the statements made within it. 0/1
Conclusion
8/10. This book is, surprisingly, quite a pleasant read. I’d go so far as to say that it is a very good book. Not only that, but I recommend it to absolutely every single human being, because reading this is, frankly, a lot more digestible than reading Aristotle. Not only that, it also puts things into perspective, reminding us that no matter how well stuff seems to be going, it can turn out that nothing at all has come of it.
On the shelf with good books I put it. Not the perfect shelf, but not the shameful shelf, either. It’s there, somewhere, with its neat cover, maybe provoking curiosity.