Carl Honore

Musings on time

Writing the new book is absorbing all of my energy at the moment so the blog, along with almost everything else, has taken a back seat. But to prove I’m still here, and that I haven’t slowed down so much that I’ve fallen into a coma, I’m posting a couple of quotations sent to me by a reader. They hit the nail right on the head:

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

— Will Rogers

Don’t judge a book…

It’s not very often that I find myself applauding the US State Department. But recently Condoleezza Rice’s fiefdom joined forces with leading US companies to issue tips for Americans traveling abroad. One is: “Slow down. (We talk fast, eat fast, move fast, live fast. Many cultures do not.)” Another is: “Speak slower. (A fast talker can be seen as aggressive and threatening.)” Sound advice for everyone, it seems to me, not just Americans.

In search of lost time

Based on a comprehensive trawl of the Internet, the Oxford English Dictionary has just released a list of the most commonly used nouns in English. Guess what came in at Number One. No, it wasn’t ‘sex’ or ‘money.’ It wasn’t even ‘Viagra.’ It was ‘time.’ More evidence of our collective obsession with the clock? Very likely.

Read Slow…fast!

It’s been a long, long time coming but I finally have a blog. So that means regular dispatches from the front line of the Slow revolution. I’d like to kick off with something a reader in Victoria, British Columbia told me the other day. In order to circulate popular books more quickly, her local library offers them on a seven-day loan, with each extra day incurring a one dollar charge. So in Victoria you can now borrow a copy of In Praise of Slow with a large sticker on the front cover saying “Fast Reads”. You couldn’t make it up.