Milan Kundera · Slow

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: Slow is a novel written in French by Milan Kundera after he moved to France. Compared to the heavy themes explored in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, the theme of Slow appears astonishingly light, making it arguably the most lighthearted work among all of Kundera's novels. The author himself once said, "There is no serious word in the entire work." Through a driving incident during a journey, the author discusses themes of speed, time, memory, history, and forgetting. Set against the backdrop of a castle, it interweaves beautiful love stories, and the juxtaposition of contemporary and 18th-century timelines creates a surreal form of speed, a gift bestowed upon humanity by the technological revolution.
Runners, unlike motorcyclists, are always aware of their own presence, constantly thinking about the blisters on their feet and the shortness of their breath. When running, they feel their weight and age more acutely than ever, becoming acutely aware of their own aging. When one entrusts the performance of speed to a machine, everything changes. From that moment on, the body is no longer concerned with speed, handed over instead to an invisible, non-materialized speed—a pure, tangible, and mesmerizing speed.
How did the joy of slowness disappear? Ah, where have the idlers of old gone? The heroes of folk songs, the loafers who wandered from mill to mill, spending nights outdoors—where are they now? Have they vanished along with the countryside, the grasslands, the clearings in the woods, and nature itself? In the Czech language, there is a proverb used to describe their sweet idleness: "They are the windows through which they gaze upon the benevolent God." Those who gaze upon the windows of the benevolent God will never grow weary; they are happy.
In our world, leisure has degenerated into idleness, which is a different matter entirely. The idle person is a lost one, one who is always bored and perpetually searching for the action they lack.