We talk about slowness, and then about distance in the imaginary terrain of time, in continuous motion like the landscape rushing past through the train window. Slow and fast first get their meaning relative to the units of length on the axis of time: second, minute and hour define the pace of existence. Seen as a curve in time, our journey through life is a span – measured precisely and, one might think, ungenerously. A finite number of weeks and days separates point A, birth, and point B, death.

From the very beginning, science has fixed its eye on the question of the length of this span and its potential extension – we do not want life to go quickly by. What should be speeded up, instead, is the movement that does not count as life but simply leads up to it: the transport distances of existence are to be shortened. As soon as parts of our life are seen to have no meaning, they become undesirable gaps in time that have to be rushed over: slowness originates in the longing for speed.

A key ambition for modern society – succinctly summarised by its catch phrases comfort and efficiency – is to minimise the time spent on profoundly human activities: procuring, preparing and eating food, developing and nurturing relationships, moving in one’s environment. Activities that constitute part of what it means to be human in a vital way are reduced as much as possible in life, viewed as obstacles on humankind’s path away from bodily dependence and vulnerability.

As a result, basic human acts are deprived of their intrinsic meaning – large parts of life cease to be alive; presence in one’s existence is replaced by the non-presence of a drawn-out waiting. So the same modernity that seeks to abolish slowness with its perpetual acceleration has also created it: only when aspects of life are drained of life are they afflicted with a sense of slowness.

Only activities that lack meaning in and of themselves go slowly; such things wind up getting in the way of life instead of constituting life itself. Waiting during a train journey, waiting in traffic, in a queue at the bank or in a shop, is waiting for life to get going, to escape the imprisonment of a meaningless interlude. Time becomes something that has to be passed: if every trip were simply a distance to be travelled toward one’s goal – the sexual act toward orgasm, work toward leisure, eating toward satiation – then let it happen quickly! This is thus the heart of the paradox of slowness as a cultural product: it is precisely what we want to speed up that is experienced as being slow, because we have already overtaken our experience. Once something is said to go too slowly, it cannot go fast enough. We are no longer present in order to experience; we are already at our destination and await our delayed arrival.

What then are the mechanisms behind this leaching of meaning from everyday activities? The most powerful individual force driving this change is no doubt technology. If the body can be separated from the core of human existence, then everything from digging ditches to bearing children can be seen as a host of mechanical functions that can be performed equally as well and often better by a machine. It is also a fact that the industrial revolution – at least for people in certain social strata and in certain parts of the world – gave rise to a larger number of tasks that were mechanical in the most literal sense of the word, rather than reducing the number of such jobs. In this way, industrialisation reinforced the mechanical view of the world that was itself a product of it: a world that was said to be vacuous and full of mechanised tasks, gradually reshaped into being precisely that.

However, the fragmentation and mechanisation of existence that erupted with the industrial revolution can be traced back even further, all the way back to the separation of jobs that was the first consequence of agricultural society. Humanity’s transformation into cultivators of land can be said to constitute the very origin of labour, in the sense of a category of activity separated from other aspects of life. And as we know, people’s image of their world shapes their self-image: if no activity except for one’s own is considered greater than its mechanical function, then there is no reason either to believe that one’s own activity – internal or external – should occupy such a space. Technological development in society is thus just as much caused by as the cause of a fragmentation of existence into discrete activities that lack inherent meaning or any discernible link to the essence of human life. And as existence seems to be increasingly soulless, it also appears to be increasingly slow; more and more parts of life will be subsumed in the sphere of meaningless activity that is supposed to be reduced to avoid getting in the way of the real substance of that elusive thing called life.

The view of history as perpetual progression leaves little room for what seems to lack direction; any activity that has to be repeated becomes by definition meaningless. The human activities that – in fact, like most – result in nothing other than their own repetition end up getting in the way of the individual’s journey to betterment: eat today and you still have to eat tomorrow, you slept well last night but you won’t necessarily sleep better tonight, you make love and in the same way you’ll still want to make love again. The progressive way of thinking that began to take form in the West in the 17th century, reinforced by the scientific revolution of that century and the subsequent industrial revolution, gives linear time an unambiguous direction.

And that is the continual increase in speed as a consequence of modernity – or, if you will, of civilisation. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of pockets of resistance today – Slow Food, Slow Sex, Slow Exercise, the whole Slow Cities thing are concepts that aim to make a break with speed as an ideology. The deliberate slowness cultivated by these movements has the potential to not just question the speed of existence but ultimately its meaning. Time is the real hard currency of modern man: to perform an act slowly is to ascribe it importance. The tasks and feelings dismissed as meaningless in modern discourse are being rehabilitated and allowed to spill over the confining walls of our era’s linguistic structures. Instead of moving forward along a line, slowness takes a step to the side. Together with Carlo Levi, from his introduction to Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy:

If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows – perhaps … time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.

Whereas the adult’s linguistic conception of a linear notion of time suggests an almost tangible greatness, the child has still not internalised this view of abstract time and is thus completely immersed in the present. The slowness of immaturity, which seems capable of stretching a child’s day into an adult’s year, is thus not so much slowness as timelessness, since the slowness we have seen belongs to the objectified sphere of time. Infantile time is the exact opposite of technologically constructed time, which is ostensibly disconnected from biological and astronomical developments; its course is a movement of, not in, reality. The processes in the human unconscious, in some sense always a child, are not processes in time. Yet despite the two differing natures of slowness – the timeless and the boring – it is in some sense the remnants of the first that produce the second. For Freud, the desire for immediate gratification is a natural consequence of the primitive individual’s lack of a sense of time: for someone who cannot imagine a future that brings relief, each instance of suffering becomes endless, each deprivation unbearable, in its being of the moment.

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It is also, Freud says, disappointment over the failure to gratify one’s needs that constitutes the driving force moving the individual to acquire an understanding of the concept of future, as consolation and compensation for the relief that does not come immediately. Once a notion is established of the total meaninglessness of profoundly human activities, it is then the child’s anger over the withholding of what is desired – satiation, orgasm, the journey’s end – that makes him increasingly want to increase the pace.

It seems clear that time experienced by the child is essentially incompatible with modernity’s view of time as a metaphorical tape measure. The cultural development of a maturing individual requires him to liberate himself from the child’s eternal present and instead embark on a path measured in units of time. Modern man’s search for slowness stems both from a desire to revalue fundamental aspects of human existence – and thus abolish that opposing aspect of slowness, which is boredom – and from a longing to let oneself be suffused by a present that is not broken into hours and minutes. In conflict with the dynamics of modern society, he aims to ultimately attain meaning and timelessness. Like Proust, he is seeking “the only setting in which [he] could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is, outside Time.” Where will he find it?

Perhaps in creativity, the creative state in which the child in the adult is allowed to break through and make room for the present and the simultaneous presence of the past. The timelessness of creativity is manifested in the altered direction of time found, for instance, in Beckett, in the cyclical narrative structure with which James Joyce allows his epic Finnegans Wake to bite its own tail, in the tumultuous romp among recollections found variously in Harry Martinson, W. G. Sebald or Bruno Schulz. To again use Proust’s words, the labour of the artist is to “elucidate and give expression to a reality that lies outside Time.” Perhaps in love, in its ability to enrich every movement with meaning. The presence of one’s beloved makes activities one was once indifferent to rich with meaning and suspends the uni-directionality of time so that the present can expand in every direction: “We have always known each other,” says someone who loves, “and we will always be together.” They see it in themselves when they close their eyes: there is no waiting in people’s dreams.