Take Your Time.
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May 3, 2004 My classmates think I live too far from school, but I think the 25-minute walk is just right. It gives me time for uninterrupted observing and thinking free from the usual speed of society. I live near Whitney Avenue, a loud and busy street, marked with potholes, worn from ritualistic commutes and bad weather. |
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I cross Whitney, glancing at the newspaper rack to see what events made headlines the night before. Further ahead, the Yale organic farm teems with new growth. The student-run operation reminds me of my former home in San Francisco, in particular the summer when I volunteered to harvest produce. Row by row, hand over hand, we picked the dust-covered onions until the straw bins were full. Similarly, the students bend like zucchini while tending the land. The small park adjacent to the farm makes for a pleasant diversion from the path to school, but generally, I continue up Edwards Street to one of my favorite intersections in New Haven. I like the intersection at Prospect and Edwards because the traffic light there creates enough time and privacy for moments of unguarded self expression. Each time I pass here, I am reminded of the photography of Kurt Caviezel. Caviezel published a book of images that captured the variety of emotions and activities visible below the traffic light at his Zurich apartment. Kisses shared, make-up adjust-ed, and hair combed. The tenderness of humanity is visible in Caviezel’s pictures. Videotaping the New Haven intersection from the adjacent park with a telephoto lens, I saw two types of people: those who relax at a red light and those who do not. I become the calm driver in a Milan Kundera novel: the slow driver, the one who does not turn right on red when it is illegal. I imagine myself followed by an anxious driver behind me. |
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 . . . This essay appears as the introduction to the thesis book. . . . |
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“I check the rearview mirror: still the same car unable to pass me because of the oncoming traffic. Beside the driver sits a woman; why doesn’t the man tell her something funny? Why doesn’t he put his hand on her knee? Instead, he’s cursing the driver ahead of him for not going fast enough, and it doesn’t occur to the woman, either to touch the driver with her hand; mentally she’s at the wheel with him, and she’s cursing me too.”1 Leaving the stress of the road to those on the road, I walk left at the light, heading down Prospect Street, flanked by old trees and hearty Yale buildings. Just ahead is a New Haven architectural gem: Eero Saarinen’s late 1950s hockey rink. Nicknamed “the Whale,” its curved cement surface provides a clean continuous shell around the small arena. Futuristically engineered, but organically inspired in form, the roof extends over the entrance. Its glass doors give pedestrians, like myself, a view of the happenings inside. For six weeks last year, I stopped twice a week at the Whale for “Beginning Ice-Skating.” Six of us learned first how to survive on the ice, and weeks later, to move gracefully about the space. Time stopped on the ice, in part, because there were no required skills to accomplish at each session. Each one had her (I was the only male in the class) own goals, so we learned and skated at our own pace. The ice, was, after all, always there, and with the rink on my walk, I could stop in for a session whenever I pleased. |
1 MILAN KUNDERA, P22.
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The ice captures the memory of the paths from the skates, displaying the arcs and lines without any clue of sequence. Each morning, we would wait for the Zamboni machine to drive over the ice, row by row. The Zamboni forces the skaters to pause on the sidelines to watch the cuts of the ice disappear. This pause comes every morning, a ritual paralleling the stillness of the weekly Sabbath. Both are periods of reflection, where movements in space are relegated to honor time. Scholar Abraham Heschel writes, “most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face. Time to us is sarcasm.”2 My skating classmates, often anxious at the site of the Zamboni, prefer to be making marks on the ice, not waiting to see them removed. Within minutes, the Zamboni drives away under the stands, leaving the ice clear and open. Gladly freed from the helplessness of waiting, the skaters leave the stands to explore the ice. |
2 ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL, P5. |
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Past the ice rink lies another spiritual place: the Grove Street Cemetery. Only the tip of a tall granite memorial is visible peek-ing above the surrounding 8-foot wall. Cemeteries are places where people slow down to respect the stillness of those underground and the emptiness of the land above. As in a church, the appropriate speed of movement slows. When I enter a cemetery it is as if time stops. I become Nicholson Baker’s lead character in The Fermata. He has the power to stop time, creating a cemetery-like stillness anywhere he goes. Since others are frozen around him, he takes his time to inspect his surroundings. His movements slow to allow him to absorb minute details. Although I cannot stop time as Baker’s character does, I can move as he does—slower and with more watchful eye. However, on my walk, the wall does not allow me, or others, to feel the stillness inside. I walk next to the wall, forced to travel farther than if I could pass through the cemetery. I find that with the cemetery—a temporal decelerator—blocked from my view, I am actually walking differently at this point: faster. Soon enough, I’ve rounded the corner and am approaching my car mechanic. He’s rarely outside, but the old brass trophies in the window of his shop greet me. I first took my car there because it was convenient. My 1985 Volvo has spent a few nights in the service station, each time returned quickly. Speed is a good quality in a mech-anic, but only if the work gets done right. After the mechanic, I have to endure my least favorite stretch: the “undergrad” block of New Haven. A half-dozen well-branded awnings cover businesses catering to the 18-24 year old population. There are the music venue, the budget pizza place, the copy center, and an Au Bon Pain. Doesn’t that mean “To Good Bread?” Can bread be good if the ingredients are shipped from a warehouse in Queens? We lose local businesses because chain stores like Au Bon Pain offer inexpensive and fast service but with a lower quality. With price and speed as a priority for most people, the standard of quality drops. This phenomenon is not specific to stores, but affects the design and technology communities as well. With this in mind I stop into the local cafe “The Book Trader” for coffee. It is the equivalent of “Cheers” for the graphic design department. As in Cheers, we know everyone in there, they know us. But unlike Cheers, we order everything “to go.” Coffee breaks are no longer casual respites loaded with conversations and the lulls in between, but have been reduced to fetching a legal dose of stimulation. Complicit with the new norm, I buy a coffee, and walk quickly to my desk to drink it. A few salutations and then up the 23 stairs into the studio. The coat comes off, my silver messenger bag joins an assortment of objects in the cubicle and I slowly change my shoes like Mr. Rogers. I sit in my orange-cushioned office chair and open my Powerbook. For the next 12 hours I try to figure out how to argue the benefits of slowness to faculty who pop in from New York, fly in from Amsterdam, rush to catch the express train home to Boston, or are available only by email. Perhaps I’ll start by reading the newspaper. References Baker, Nicholson. The Fermata. New York: Random House, 1995. Caviezel, Kurt. Red Light. Zurich; New York: Edition Patrick Frey, c/o Scalo, 1999. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Sabbath: its meaning for modern man. New York, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951, p5. Kundera, Milan. Slowness. New York: Harper, 1995, p22. |
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Master's Thesis,
Yale University
. . .
John Caserta