ABOUT A SLOW DOWN YOU CAN ENJOY
I met journalist, poet, author and environmentalist Harry Eyres on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in mid April for this interview on the busy terrace of the Southbank Centre Café, London. Harry Eyres writes the weekly Slow Lane column in the Financial Times and is a patron of the Slow Down Festival London which took place for the first time this year.
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Christine Joos Slow Down and Recession, how does this go together?
Harry Eyres There has been a lot of fear and anxiety and that does not help at all, but of course it could be an opportunity. I have been writing for years about how one can enjoy quite simple things that don’t cost very much money. So, the fact that certain people don’t have any money is not necessarily such a terrible thing. There is an awful lot of things you can do, that are tremendously life enhancing and don’t cost money. Examples in my columns are things like learning a poem by heart. That does not cost anything and it is incredibly enriching.
CJ And how did you come to this idea to write the Slow Lane Column for the Financial Times, which combines environmental issues and slowness?
HE Well, right. It was me and an editor. We kind of thought it out together, really. I have been wanting to do a column like this for ages. It was sort of ecological but not only ecological. It was a sort of looking at some new ways of thinking that I thought were kind of in the air. ‘Slowness’ sounded like a rather good title, because it is sort of quite broad, it’s more about enjoyment. The Slow Movement is really quite focused on enjoyment, whereas the environmental movement can seem rather, quite against enjoyment: “You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” And you start to feel really bad, if you go on holiday, or something. I think some of the environmental movement is a bit extreme, because it has become rather religious in some ways. It is like a sin to fly to Spain for instance. And the Slow Movement has a slightly less moralistic view perhaps. I would call myself an environmentalist, but I think enjoyment, the fact that you can enjoy yourself without spending lots of money and obviously without damaging the planet or the people is actually a very positive message.
The problem is that some people seem to assume that it has got to be very negative to be less energy consuming, but I don’t see that that has to be the case … I think walking is much more enjoyable than most other ways of getting around.
CJ Yeah, compared to the tube…
HE Cycling…
CJ …is kind of dangerous in London…
HE …it would be wonderful if it wasn’t so dangerous.
CJ Tell us about the London Slow Down Festival and how you are involved.
HE One of the organisers approached me because I was writing the Slow Lane column which is on the same lines and she asked me if I wanted to be a patron of the Slowdown Festival and I said “Yes”. I am doing a couple of events; a discussion about slow travel with another journalist here in the Royal Festival Hall and I am also doing a wine tasting and poetry reading combined.
CJ Why do you think it is better to do things more slowly and not as fast as possible?
HE Enjoyment is really the key. Some people maybe do really enjoy rushing around, but I really hate it when I feel rushed. I feel at that point you seize to enjoy anything. Life actually becomes incredibly sort of empty if you try to do too much.
CJ But there seems to be a lot of pressure from outside to do as many things as quickly as possible?
HE There is a great pressure. The Slow Movement, although it seems to be quite light in a way, has quite a radical potential. I mean it would be a quite real challenge for the way people live if anyone took it seriously. But I think I do because I am just sort of maybe constituted that way that I can’t rush all the time.
I noticed there was a piece in The Guardian today, about the Slowdown Festival that really rubbishes it. The writer obviously thinks it is kind of a ludicrous idea, because you can’t possibly slow down, there was so much to do. She sounds like she did not really want to.
I thought she could rather say more about the potential political issues, gender issues about slowing down. I got the impression that this writer, Jess – she probably describes herself as a feminist– felt somehow there was something anti-feminist about this slowing down, because it seemed as if she kind of prided herself as a woman of being incredibly busy and the whole idea of she should be less busy sounded to her as kind of an insult, or maybe going back to the past. That could be maybe a danger of the Slow Movement and it could be seen as a conservative movement in a bad way.
CJ The idea that there is such big festival about Slowing Down now means there must be a general interest in the Slow Movement.
HE Yes, I think you can see that quite generally around in the culture. In the media there are endless articles about slowness suddenly. It is certainly kind of in the air as an idea.
CJ Do you think this has got something to do with the current global crisis?
HE Well, I think the crisis has made it more relevant in a way. I think in the past it was only seen as something quite harmlessly excentric. Only few people here I knew were talking about slowing down as being a nice idea, but suddenly … a sort of Slow Down has hit everybody. But can you make something positive out of that? That’s what I am trying to do. This is also kind of a time of reflection and thinking.
CJ Rethinking of values maybe? In your “Does Madonna read Nietzsche?” column you were suggesting ”old and higher” values of the 19th century had been superseded by the lower, materialistic values in the 20th century, which were now again breaking down in a way. Do you think we need new values now?
HE I think it’s a very, very interesting situation actually and it’s not that obvious that a lot of people feel very disoriented. Money was kind of the only thing left, if Nietzsche was right, and I am not saying he was altogether right. It’s amazing how money suddenly turned out to be not actually that solid. There were a few weeks you were not sure whether it was entirely gone, whether your money would come out of the hole in the wall. Well, it might not come out, I thought: “Is there anything in there?” It’s really weird and I think that’s definitely disorienting and I think it could be profoundly creative in some way.
I think the trouble with new values is that when people rush in saying: “We need new values.”, then the new values turn out rather like the old values so in a funny way I wonder what would happen if we tried to live for a while without, not without values in the sense of anarchically or just not caring, but just valuing small things rather than…
CJ …something heavy and exhausting?
HE I do not know whether we really have to search for values. I think they are there; it’s just that we cannot see them. We tend to run and walk faster. I mean there is a value in being alive, a value in this day, it’s a sunny day.
CJ From your perspective, with all these changes going on at the moment, what do you think how design is going to change?
HE I think it is a very interesting subject. Attending a conference at the Art Centre in Barcelona, we were staying in a hotel which was meant to be THE designer hotel [Hotel OMM, Barcelona, Spain]. There was something clearly wrong to me with this design from an environmental or ecological point of view. It was very wrong because it wasn’t at all low energy. It was very high energy. Everything was designed to be ON all the time, there were all these screens, devices and everything. And you really don’t need all of that. I think minimal is a way design should be probably going. I think it is a very important subject to rethink design in this ecological context.
CJ Maybe less pretentious and more human-centered in a way that is more working like an organism?
HE I am sure that’s right. Because who wants all this fancy stuff? I mean functional design that does not waste resources, that is easy to use, that is not pretentious, is needed.
CJ Thank you very much for this interview.
http://www.ft.com/arts/columnists/harryeyres
