The cult of performance leads our society to emphasise the values of success and continuous optimisation in all areas. Slowness, redundancy and randomness are therefore negatively perceived. Olivier Hamant, in his book, reclaims them by his knowledge of biological processes.
What can we learn from life sciences? While some biological mechanisms certainly boast formidable efficiency, recent advances instead highlight the fundamental role of errors, incoherence or slowness in the robustness of living organisms. Should life be considered suboptimal? To what extent could suboptimality become a counter-model to the credo of performance and control in the Anthropocene?
In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and…
A second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver.
This short book takes a second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. It tracks the paths of writers that built their works around non-linear thinking. Bergson called on distraction to sharpen our perceptions; Proust's greatest epiphany came from stumbling, not walking in a straight line; Nietzsche never trusted a thought that didn't come from…
In The Plenitude of Distraction, Marina van Zuylen (2018) praises the ability to stray from linear thinking. Rather than an affliction, distraction can be a way of moving around open to an epiphany, to the grace of receiving an insight. Being distraught is a way to get lost in order to find oneself – or something bigger than oneself.
