Why would anyone want to careen through life at 140 mph? Even at that speed we can all catch flashes of the reality that sits just off to the side of our path, the blurred natural beauty of the life we could experience if we could slow down. If you are reading this essay you have absorbed enough of the content of P-A to be able to read between the lines, and intuit insights our source for this essay, Roger Cohen, did not have; you have already begun the process of slowing down. What you have is a profound context in which to interpolate at a more profound level just what the elements of an authentic existence might feel like.
In this essay a few key words will be in bold type to hint at possible insights you might miss as you speed to your next destination.
Says Cohen, writing in The New York Times about his excursion in East Germany, “I was going 115 miles per hour on a German autobahn when it occurred to me that one reason the German economy is doing so well is that people can get from one place to another so fast … Another car passed me, a Mercedes. It must have been going 140 mph.
“Communism was a monster … But in parts of eastern Germany, as in Havana, some of the madness of development is evident in a strange beauty preserved. There is a certain silence, or slowness, that the god of efficiency and hyperconnectedness will not tolerate … Does it take a monster to preserve such intimacy and innocence?
“The question of genuine, undiluted experience has been on my mind. Germans have a good word for something authentic: “echt” … The thrill of the unexpected is [has been] lost.”
“I don’t want to live in the hush of eastern Germany, but I recognize a simplicity lost and the possibility there of an undistracted existence.
“The modern world’s tech-giddy control and facilitation makes us stupid. Awareness atrophies. Dumb gets dumber … We demand shortcuts, as if there are shortcuts to genuine experience.
“I was headed now, on a whim, to Worlitz, where, in the 18th century, a prince of Anhalt-Dessau made a park that was his vision of paradise. An Arcadian place of temples and grottoes and lovely lakes, a hymn to the Enlightenment, where a Toleranzblick, or “view of tolerance,” offers the sight of a round synagogue built in the guise of a Roman temple and, behind it, a Gothic church tower.
“I crossed the Elbe at Coswig … An upright German, gruff, manned the thing [ferry] … The ferry moved very slowly through the swirling water: Experience as it once was.” And can be again.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
