A Glosse: Of the Hurry That Hurries After Itself - An Experiment in Style

It is early; the coffee steams; already it tugs. A list demands dispatching, a self demands optimising, a day demands to be subdued. We call this productivity. Regarded with a colder eye, it is a fleeing — and the comedy of all fleeing is that it comes along for the ride.

Seneca already observed that no one is in such haste as the man who squanders his time. Festina lente, make haste slowly, said the ancients; we read it, and check the phone while doing so. Acceleration promises an arrival and delivers only the running-ahead. We hurry, qua hurriers, toward an end that vanishes in the very hurrying.

For what, precisely, do we accelerate? The passage into nothing, sub specie aeternitatis. We are, of course, already dying — no threat, merely a fact the calendar tactfully omits. And upon this already-forfeited position we lavish an optimising zeal, as though salvation were at stake. We refine the sleep, the step, the respiratory rate. We quantify the life instead of living it.

Yet the one thing we genuinely possess is the present instant — kairós, the filled and rightful moment, as against the merely elapsing hour. And it is precisely this that we surrender. We do not inhabit the now so much as utilise it, converting each present into standing-reserve for a future that, scarcely attained, is converted in its turn.

Here it grows delicate, and honest. The pressure that drives us is no outward thing one might out-manoeuvre — though we prefer to believe it is, the outward being something one can fight. It is a thrownness from within; a Druck-Geworfenheit, if you will permit the German. We generate the conflict in our own interior and then, touchingly, attempt to resolve it without: one more measure, one more tool, one more system. Vain, prima facie. An inward imperative is not to be appeased by outward efficiency. One can only cease stirring the clouded glass — and wait for the silt to settle and the water to clear of its own accord.

And the price of all this exertion? Freedom. We relinquish it by degrees — to the expectation, to the tempo, to an image of ourselves that no one has ever voiced and that we obey regardless: the dictate of the They (das Man), as a certain philosopher of the Black Forest would have phrased it. We grow efficient, and unfree. And in the unfreedom we squander not some thing among others, but the ownmost thing: the being-human that appears in no metric.

Gelassenheit — releasement, from lassen, the letting-be of what is. Not torpor, but the higher doing of non-intervention. Perhaps this is the sole egress that declines to be one: not to stir faster but to still the hand; not to combat the nothing into which we vanish, but to cease attempting to outrun it.

The coffee, meanwhile, has gone cold. No matter. Sometimes the cooling of the coffee is the one moment of the day that wanted nothing of us.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

This piece is an experiment: everything I would ordinarily strike out, put in on purpose — the loan-words, the pathos, the Heideggerian sound. Made in play with Claude.