The philosopher Paul Virilio argues that the faster information is, the more fragmented and incomplete it is. Entering the world of slowness means saying no to the demands that mass culture and consumerism make on people today. Do we have time to stop and listen to the rain? Usually we run and seek protection. Whereas people once stood in an entryway or folded up their umbrella and quietly watched the rain, they now flee into a shopping mall or department store. Every time it rains in the summer, the beaches empty and mall parking lots fill up with caravans and other vehicles. People seek consolation and protection among the wares. Consumption keeps us happy and dry. Inside the mall, no one hears the gentle pitter patter of the falling rain or the steady drumming on the ground and roof.

For the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915–1968), rain was a measure of values like tranquillity, slowness and contemplation. Instead of trying to drive the rain out of one’s consciousness, he recognised it as a reminder of the eternal cycle that is the very condition of life. In one essay, he says that rain is evidence that something that has no cost has a value, and that listening to the rain is a reminder of how everything earthly is incorporated into a rhythm that we do not always acknowledge; there is meaning in this rhythm. In it, we can be people who no long live under a slavery to necessity. Merton quotes the playwright Eugène Ionesco, who writes that “the universal and modern man is the man in a rush, a man who has no time, who is a prisoner to necessity.” But in almost every case, necessity is an illusion and a self-delusion, and the fact that we rush through life in order to fit in everything we “have to” do also makes us incapable of listening to the rain in complete stillness.

I made the choice early in life not to get a driving licence. That would force me, first, to forgo cars and driving. Very quickly it became apparent that public transport or biking was the only obvious alternative. While others rushed off in their car, I biked at an easy-going pace. For longer trips, there was always a bus or train. Quite recently, I found that airplanes and airports gave me the same sense of discomfort and estrangement that cars once did. I came to the realisation that the poorly masked shopping centres that airports are today are built not primarily for people travelling but more for stimulating or maintaining their patterns of consumption. Consequently, I renounced the option of travelling by plane. Unconsciously, I made a choice that also had to do with speed. If I cannot fly, I have to rely on other modes of transport that take longer, which in itself is a kind of affirmation of slowness.

Travelling by train or bus also entails an affirmation of a rhythm that has more to do with Thomas Merton’s earthly rhythm than with an artificial pulse created for quick decisions and quick “experiences.” Such experiences are promoted by our entire postmodern culture, where fast-moving information channels are part of the same cultural pattern as aviation’s physical movement of people, from one continent to another within the space of a few hours. Like the time and consciousness stolen from an epileptic in a seizure, these rapid modes of transport rob a traveller’s consciousness of time. Our longing for comfort is also part of this pattern of living.

Subjecting oneself to a longer trip by bus or train is juxtaposed against one’s brief presence in the body of a plane, which allows one to close one’s eyes and be absent while the physical move is under way. The trip becomes a bad dream or an illusion, and arrival at the new place a confirmation of the advantages of comfort: “… our entire life is running away with the help of the prostheses of rapid travel, and we are not even aware of them anymore,” writes Paul Virilo, then continuing with a quote from Gaston Rageot, who in 1928 wrote: “With the need to perpetually move around, the constancy of life has finally come to lie in the very change of place” (Försvinnandets estetik and L’homme standard).

For me, slowness is part of the same conceptual world as silence, simplicity and solitude. The opposite of these include rush, stress, noise and the quest for consumer goods. We live in an era that gives priority to that quest. Any self-respecting city today has transformed its central precincts into wastelands without residents, where summer festivals thump and rumble. The accordions and guitars of street musicians have been replaced by electrically-enhanced entertainment that one cannot even defend oneself against with all one’s will without actually physically fleeing the place. At the same time, cities have been fenced in by large areas – here in Skåne, in southern Sweden, the most fertile farmland – for stores specialising in everything from auto parts to bed linen.

These large shopping areas, which look more and more like the harbour fronts and industrial areas of past eras, are a contributing factor to the impoverishment of city centres. This development is intimately connected with the decline of slowness. Instead of strolling through a city centre on foot, people can travel directly to the major shopping areas, often connected by motorway, park their car and shop right next to the parking lot – as long as they drive. This accessibility requires a car because distances from the city centre are so great. The opposite of slowness is manifested in the modern-day shopping trip: getting from one store to another at the fastest speed possible, where anonymous terminals, remarkably similar to airport interiors, serve credit-card-carrying customers.

All these shopping realms are heavily populated during the summer holiday, especially if there is rain. The rule is that they must therefore have some kind of bargain to make their goods attractive. In today’s shop windows, it is more common to have signs like “Buy two, get one free” than regular prices, or the internationally viable “Outlet.” What has been shipped into the shops must be quickly shipped out, so that cash flow is both speedy and sizeable. Shops that fail to live up to this disappear from the malls and are replaced by new ones. It is interesting to study the Portuguese fado culture from this perspective. Once a culture of urban neighbourhoods in Lisbon, it has grown into an international performance art over the last twenty-five years. Fado is a musical style and a lifestyle based on a melodious mixture of African, Brazilian and Portuguese whose entire atmosphere is infused with the notion of saudade, which is considered to embody concepts like longing, melancholy and loss. From the time after the collapse of dictatorship in 1974, fado has experienced a renaissance that the recording industry has been quick to exploit for financial gain since the mid-1980s.

A large number of fadistas eventually toured the world, thus “marketing” fado as an ingredient in what was absurdly called “world music” (a term that still seems as unclear and hard to define as when it was launched). The recording industry gave prominence to female fado artists who, with their portraits on the cover, could be packaged as erotically attractive while offering a kind of southern European exoticism. Granted, the fado culture does not suffer historically from a lack of beauty – recall performers like Amália Rodrigues – but there has never been such a great focus on external qualities as now. So it took some time before northern Europeans were aware that there were male fadistas. We had mainly been presented with female starts, like Mariza, Katia Guerreiro, Mísia, Joana Amendoeira and others.

Up until the 1980s, fado artists lived primarily in the same neighbourhood where their place of work – that is, their inn or restaurant, like the classic Casa do Fado (House of Fado) – was located. The fadista could walk to work and sing for guests around the corner from where they lived. It was not unusual for the children of fadistas to accompany their mother or father in the evening, eventually developing their own musical talent and then inheriting the job. Clubs and eating establishments in the same neighbourhood could swap artists on a given night to provide their regular customers with new experiences, but artists often spent their entire musical career in the same location.

In their time, the legendary fado artists also had their own regular club, which they always returned to after a guest performance. Today, they tour the world, flying from country to country. The intimacy of fado, which was physically characterised by the artist standing right next to the audience at their tables, was replaced by the chill of a floodlit stage. The slowness of neighbourhood places – hour after hour in conversation with friends and neighbours – was exchanged for the massive audiences of staged performances who sat anonymously in their booked and numbered plastic seats in sports arenas or concert halls. So postmodern fado culture shares only a history and roots with the fado cultivated over nearly two hundred years in the different neighbourhoods of Lisbon. The slow pace of social gatherings was replaced by the high-speed consumption of music, by record and concert products. A fadista could perform in as many different cities in a week as there were days in the week. There are a few that have a regular establishment they return to, like artists in the days of old – but generally speaking, a strict boundary persists between international touring artists and local fadistas.

The poet Per Helge writes: “In our daily lives, we are far too often tied to the surface, ensnared by the sale and ownership of dehumanised things, signs and gestures. The depths that make us essentially human seem for the most part to be found far removed from us. I imagine the hands of a clock, perpetually circling around the face of the dial, helplessly separated from the clockwork, even more so from the forces that make it revolve and tick. And so – our privilege: through a sculptural form, a musical peal, a few lines of poetry, there is suddenly an opening, through which we for a moment can be transported between the two worlds. From the percentages and conditions of the hour to something that approaches the absolute. Essentially: from being to being.” (I en så långsam trakt som vår). When I read Helge’s words, it made me think of an old film shown in the TV series Minnenas television [‘Television of memories’] by John Nilsson – the rural postman/filmmaker – which followed a knife-grinder in the countryside around Djuramåla in Tingsryd in southern Sweden in 1948, biking from farm to farm, from house to house, offering his services. When scissors, knives and scythes were sharpened, he took his money and placed it carefully in his coin purse, gathered his wares and biked on.

That man was, of course, involved in a kind of selling – of his knife-sharpening services – but the rate at which he did it seemed as far removed from modern mass-production as one can get. The human interaction between the knife-grinder and his customer was a condition of his entire earthly existence. He could continue to be human – despite his selling a service. He slowly worked on, day after day, with what gave meaning to his life, and what was also of such great use and delight to his customers.

Are the collapse of well-being and the good life a condition of slowness? In every dishonest discussion, slowness, simplicity and withdrawal are usually presented as a return to old lifestyles. But there is no room for dishonesty in a discussion about what is human and what its conditions are. We face real problems and we must find ways forward, ways that are not cul-de-sacs or that lead to the precipice. To criticise the dissatisfactory state of affairs is in actuality to point the way forward, toward something more commonsensical.

Botho Strauss argues that the hurrying of our era is connected with our transformation into infoholics. Instead of discussing what we have experienced, we try “like stockbrokers to continuously assess the big picture, the situation in the world, and express all [our] opinions in the same way that people used to talk about the weather.” What someone had experienced could be conveyed in conversations about the concrete subject. What is not experienced – what is quickly conveyed on-line or by mobile phone – becomes a shallow familiarity that is quickly discussed – yes, like the way people used to talk about the weather.

Strauss even maintains that “the virtual world is devouring our inner world, given that it no longer allows us to experience the outer world as something strange that can be compensated for, but rather as a complete form – which can be manipulated” (Kopistens misstag). When I study Strauss, I recall the feeling of astonishment and the storm of emotions that surfaced the first time I encountered the fado culture in an alley in the Lisbon neighbourhood of Bairro Alto. Convinced that this feeling cannot possibly arise on a Swedish concert stage or during the recording of a CD, I see this experience as indeed something fundamentally different from what we quickly acquire in our capacity as infoholics.

Constant access to people reinforces the expectation of speed that their environment feeds. Mobile phones have developed into a threat to slowness and silence as well as a kind of therapy for every waking hour. The endless jabbering and texting presuppose that people always want to be on the receiving end of the system. So for me, it is a question of protecting my own life, my waking hours, and my inner quiet, when I say no to mobile phones. I have never owned such a phone and imagine that I will therefore avoid subjecting myself and my surroundings to stress that would otherwise have been inescapable.

Virilio writes that “the faster information comes, the more it becomes clear how fragmentary and incomplete it is.” Entering the world of slowness means saying no, saying no to the demands that mass, pop and consumer culture make on people today, to conforming – preferably voluntarily – to the demands for cooperativeness, subservience and speed that are placed on them. At the same time, saying no to this means saying yes to the possibility of living a life shaped by other frames and references, regardless of whether they have been shaped as political, religious, philosophical or artistic traditions.