The Discovery of Slowness

"This is a great work of historical fiction about the 19th century British Arctic explorer John Franklin, who eventually went missing looking for the Northwest passage. In one sense, it is a classical historical novel which retells the story with verve and vim. But Sten Nadolny also imbues it with a discussion of slowness. Franklin was by nature slow, and because of that he was out of step with the times and constantly in conflict with other people, right from the playground when he never had a ready comeback when the other kids teased him. He is condemned for being slow, but later in life his slowness came to be seen as a mark of deep thinking, care, wisdom and intelligence. That is woven as a leitmotif throughout the book. Franklin made comments in his diary about the absurd impatience of London , with people charging around and not really being present. And there are some wonderful set pieces, although they were likely invented to soup up the slowness narrative. During the Battle of Trafalgar, for instance, he and his shipmates are tangling with a French ship and a French sniper is picking off the British soldiers one by one, hidden in the rigging above. Franklin takes aim at the sniper, working the angles and the wind while everyone is hurrying him, shouting “shoot!”. But he ignores it, slows right down, and of course kills the sniper. I want to break that taboo. It’s a word to dismiss and denigrate people. It’s synonymous with lazy, torpid, unmodern, stupid – and that’s not just in English but in other languages as well. But while that taboo has taken hold, and strengthened through the 20th century, there has always been a countercurrent of people saying there is a lot to be gained from slowing down. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein famously sat in his office in Yale gazing into the middle distance for hours on end, before emerging with game changing mathematical formulae. Certainly in the intellectual world and the arts, people have always understood the power of looking slowly at the big picture."