When you turn a noun into a verb you get words like winterize and christianize. The verbalized noun that most catches the cadence of 21st century America may be "telescope." And it works even without adding any letters.....!
To telescope human activity is to slide and rush things one into the other. Very much what's happening in our world today. Hardly a moment's breath between one news cycle and the next, between triumphs and catastrophes, between humankind at its best then suddenly darkly at its worst. Today's blockbuster film is tomorrow's reduced- price DVD. Today's pop icon is tomorrow's who's-that? Today's paparazzi hero is tomorrow's rehab villain. Today's Susan Boyle sensation is tomorrow's prayer for another cannibalized human life.
Our 24/7 world telescopes everything. Everything that once took years now takes minutes (often even faster than Andy Warhol's infamous 15). So much faster and more inelegantly that our species has relinquishing the art of the pause. the moment. the dream. the hope. the prayer. Quick, no time for such sloth. We're rich and strong and have built our worlds for speed. Our lives for haste. Time is no longer for sipping but for gulping, and once gulped spit out for the next gulp.
But then when we do admit this, we often do so while rushing from this treadmill to the next. Perhaps there's a secret delight in being so rushed. Yes, after all, being rushed can make you feel important. Essential. Existential.
Speed is the drink of the successful; slow is the bitters of the failed. Just ask the I-phoned masters-of-the-universe on Wall Street, in Hollywood studios, at Vegas casinos, on celebrity television, on jets to London and Rome. These are the special people who specialize in today's drug of choice. Telescoping!
Was there once a different pace we lived? To the medieval monastics it was the pastoral past of their saints. To thinkers like Rousseau and artists like Gauguin it was the pre-civilized paradise of nature. To today's new-agers and survivalists and Woody Allen movies and nostalgia shops it's that misty time just before yesterday.
However, did such a slower wiser time really exist? Hard to say for sure. And yet there are those who very much suspect so. Those old enough to have tucked butter-scotch candy, Saturday matinees, summer kites and huckleberry friends into their memory banks. Of course, they have no proof. Nothing certifiable.
Especially nothing that will convince anyone too busy being busy.
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