Slowness

“ If the reader will try this rate of breathing, the slowness of it will surprise him. Six breaths to one minute seem to make the breathing unnecessarily slow, and just double that seems about the right number for ordinary people; and the habit of breathing at this slower rate is a great help, from a physical standpoint, toward erasing the tendency to hurry. ”

“ These motions take a considerable time owing to their number, and for the most part they are dull, owing to the slowness of the movement occasioned by the weight to be moved, which, as the patient gets stronger, is gradually increased. The slowness, the push of the movement, rather than the drive of the movement, is often recommended: the movements, we are told, should be made slowly. ”

“ Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep, drink in the intoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells and rings. . . . sphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every rooted star; sound of winds and seas and all the simmering millions of life. Moving, singing . . . so with a roar and a rush round we go and round, for ever whirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken life and speed.
But I happened to look inwards among the machinery of our roundabout, and there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel and sweating as he ground, and grinding eternally. ”

“ If I sit for a few minutes, flutter, flutter, begins every nerve in my whole system. My heart throbs as if from machinery, and the only thing, it seems, that can save me, is to leap up and walk—walk furiously, in any direction. Passing by objects swiftly,—trees, men, and women—that gives me a relief, that headlong motion disturbs the beat of the pendulum, and whirling wheels. ”

“ In the mad bustle and noise you are conscious only of mechanical power; of speed - always of speed. Your voice far away - 'The child, oh, the child!' A swooning sensation. Men's faces as triangles and horses with countless legs. ”

“ The experience of space arises from free motion, especially locomotion; speed is a direct sensation; and time is the other factor of speed. Time is measured by any uniformly moving body—that is by space and speed together. Muscular action impeded, the sense of force or resistance, is another primary sensation; and by inference from this arises our notion of “matter,” which is sometimes spoken of as a permanent possibility of sensation. Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, are all inferences from varieties of touch. ”

“ Exquisite motion! more maddening than the smooth floating stride of the race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before the stalwart hunter, or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used to climb as schoolboys after the lofty hawk’s nest; but not so maddening as the new motion of our age—the rush of the express-train, when the live iron pants and leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting; and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish ”

“ The pace at which we are living is so tremendous that sparks must rush off our wheels as we fly. Moreover, when the speed is thus increased and the elements of the soul are seen, not separately in scenes of humour or scenes of passion as our slower English minds conceive them, but streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human mind is revealed. ”

“ But I can tell you that when you have to row from sunrise to sunset, with perhaps but one or two pauses for a few minutes, it is a different thing altogether, especially if the galley is carrying despatches, and speed is necessary. Then you get so worn out and exhausted, that you can scarce move an oar through the water, until you are wakened up by a smart as if a red hot iron had been laid across your shoulders. ”

“ Faster and faster we go, faster still, and the noise increases with the speed. Bells, whistles, hammers, locomotives shrieking madly, men's voices, peddlers' cries, horses' hoofs, dogs' barkings—all united in doing their best to drown every other sound but their own, and made such a deafening uproar in the attempt that nothing could keep it out. ”

“ A characteristic mode of feeling attends this special form of augmenting or reducing our expenditure of force. The consequence is, a feeling of velocity or speed of movement. But this feeling of speed is not all. We gain another equivalent of degrees of extension; more speed in the same time being equal to more time with the same speed. It is proper to remark, however, that we are premature in speaking of extension, or in regarding it as arrived at, at once by our primary experiences of movement ”

“ To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different 'speeds.' There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes. ”

“ Caroline. Retarded motion is that of a body which moves every moment slower and slower: thus when I am tired with walking fast, I slacken my pace; or when a stone is thrown upwards, its velocity is gradually diminished by the power of gravity.
Mrs. B. Retarded motion is produced by some force acting upon the body in a direction opposite to that which first put it in motion: you who are an animated being, endowed with power and will, may slacken your pace, or stop to rest when you are tired ”

“ It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion. The water would neither flow nor boil, and fire would not heat food. The clocks, which I first believed had stopped, crept along at perhaps a minute an hour. The people I met in the streets appeared dead, frozen in lifelike attitudes. And it was only by watching them for a very long time that I [116] perceived that they did indeed have motion. One car I saw creeping slower than the most backward snail, and a dead man at the wheel of it. I went to it, opened the door, and put on the brake. ”

“ Like a traveller, who has been put out of his way, by the overflowing of some rapid stream, you have only had the fore-right path you were in overwhelmed. A few miles about, a day or two only lost, as I may say, and you are in a way to recover it; and, by quickening your speed, will get up the lost time. ”

“ Whatever speed may be attained by our fastest express the human brain can outvie. During the first hour or so our thoughts lag behind, we are still living the life that is left there, thinking of the people who dwell there, feeling the emotions experienced there. ”

“ The velocity of his motion is so great that he travels for hundreds of miles more before he can stop. Then he suddenly finds himself coming up out of water—floating. He swims ashore, but he is so exhausted, he falls right off to sleep. ”

“ We might increase the velocity by slowing time passage, that is, if it takes me a year for one heartbeat, two years to raise my arm thus, and six months to turn, my head, if all my body processes are slowed down in this way, I will be able to live a tremendous length of time, and though it takes me two hundred years to go from one star to another, so low is my time rate that the two hundred years will seem but a few minutes. ”

“ They seem beyond all understanding or explanation. The speed, by its demoralising effect upon nerve and judgment, account for a hundred or so, but the other hundreds seem simply caused by the mountains out of pure spite. ”

“ You have begun to fall like a rocket, faster, faster, ever faster, through the black-bordered lane. The wind blinds your eyes, the wind stops your breath, the wind sings in your ears, like an oriflamme stream and strain your tippet-ends, and the snow-crystals spin in your wake. ”

“ The speed of a body which has in this manner acquired any momentum whatever will, when converted into uniform motion, retain precisely such a speed as, during a time-interval equal to that of the fall, will carry the body through a distance equal to twice that of the fall. ”

“ Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch—into futurity.
'As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating greyness grew darker; then—though I was still travelling with prodigious velocity—the blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked. ”

“ Or we can follow a group of rapid lines with a group of slow ones, or a single slow, or vice versa. Finally, we can have a perfectly even and unaltered movement throughout if we desire to be monotonous. ”

“ That particular and determinate degree of velocity in a wheel, whereby it turns once round precisely in twelve hours, is that which you call the power of a clock to show the time of the day; and because such a determinate velocity of motion is made use of by us for the measure of time, is it therefore really a new quality or power distinct from the motion itself? ”

“ From a state of rest at the beginning of the fall, the speed gradually increases with the time, and the final velocity is greater still than that which the body had at any preceding instant during its descent. ”

“ Therefore hastening with all speed, in order by their exceeding celerity of movement to anticipate all rumour of their motions, trusting to their strength and activity of body, they travelled by winding roads until they reached the high ground on the tops of the mountains, the steepness of which delayed their march more than they had expected. ”

“ If I pass along a street at some unheard-of speed, but with a uniform motion, its general aspect may, on account of the contraction caused by my velocity, be a little different from what it would seem to me if I were stationary. ”

“ The dazzling rush that beats the eye, that in its fury of advance, its paroxysm of speed, is void of halts or turns, and, darting from point to point, covers and blurs the landscape till there seems [pg 218] nothing but the moving thing ”

“ Imagine to yourself a human being on board, and the awful sensations he must have experienced on her striking the rapid, which appeared for a moment to the beholders to be her last; but, as I observed before, on her masts giving way, she again righted, and was turned sideways, in which course she proceeded to the second rapid, where she struck and stuck about a minute, and it seemed as though the elements made their last and desperate effort to drive her over this rapid. ”

“ Besides, we give the very same names to the faculties of the mind as we do to the powers of the body, the nerves, and other powers of action. Thus the velocity of the body is called swiftness: a praise which we ascribe to the mind, from its running over in its thoughts so many things in so short a time. ”

“ That is, whenever a body at rest has motion given to, or if when already moving it is made to go faster or slower, or to stop, or when the direction of the motion is changed from that in a straight line. ”

“ Speed is the essential of motion, but the same particle in motion traverses a path. Motion, therefore, is speed and path, and can be measured in terms of space. Speed and path constitute motion.
The essential of time is persistence, but the relation of time is change; change may be measured in terms of motion. ”

“ From Right Habits of Motion Comes Speed of Motions. — Concentrating the mind on the next motion causes speed of motion. Under Scientific Management, the underlying thought of sequence of motions is so presented that the worker can remember them, and make them in the shortest time possible. ”

“ As Professor Bain remarks, rapid visible movements are stimulating, while slow ones are more voluptuous and allied to the richer varieties of passive sensation. In following straight lines, and in tracing the outlines of objects, the eye has, it is obvious, a choice out of an indefinite number of velocities of movement. It is probable, for the reason just given, that under these circumstances it usually prefers a slow to an excitingly rapid species of movement. ”

“ We have just given ourselves a good shake, like a Newfoundland dog, when four bells (2 a.m.) strike, and the man at the wheel is of course relieved, his time being up. It happens to be our turn, or 'trick,' at the wheel, and we must at once take to it, all dripping and exhausted as we are. ”

“ And though the wind should cease for intervals of many months, we may have by the same power a uniform perpetual motion in a very simple way.”
“The weight of a clock being wound up gives us an image of reaction. ”

“ A difficulty, however, immediately presents itself: we require motion of a particular kind; but wind will not blow, nor water fall as we please, nor as suits our peculiar wants, but according to the fixed laws of nature. We want an upward motion ”

“ This state of ecstasy, which it should really be called, increases as the velocity of descent is accelerated, until the mind can no longer enjoy the delightful sensation, but loses all knowledge, all thought, all feeling, and insensibility ensues. This condition of the senses is produced when the velocity of the body has attained a rate of 400 feet a second, or at the fourteenth second of descent—about 2,480 feet below the point of starting. ”

“ Only when still: put thou thine hand to the plough,
The spirit drives thee on.
Isen. You live too fast!
Eliz. Too fast? We live too slow—our gummy blood
Without fresh purging airs from heaven, would choke
Slower and slower, till it stopped and froze. ”

“ Yet it is clear to all that the panic which that statement inspired has not subsided, rather it is growing in force over the Earth's surface with the passing of each day. For each day is bringing our Earth nearer to death!
"For each day, each of these three intervening days, the sun's speed of rotation has continued to increase by the same exact amount! Each day its rotatory period has decreased by 4 hours more! ”

“ We can have a rapid group of syllables—what is called a line—succeeded by a slow heavy one; like the swift, scurrying-up of the wave and the sullen dragging of itself away. Or we can gradually increase or decrease our tempo, creating accelerando and rallentando effects. ”

“ And if you had gone by any circuitous route, which enabled you to arrive in time by traveling fast, the longer your route the less time you would judge that you had taken; the diminution of time would be continual as your speed approached that of light. ”