• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 288 0

period of our life as mere preparation for the next. We have to finish our education as quickly as possible so that we may embark on our professional career. We must achieve professional success as soon as we can so that we may begin to enjoy status and security. After success comes a mad dash to find something else to absorb our energies. And having invented a new problem for ourselves, we rush to find the solution as quickly as we possibly can. It seems that the present is always something to get over. We fail to see the logical consequence of living like this: if we’re always getting the present over with, then the whole of life becomes something to get over, like a flu. Chronic acceleration is a headlong gallop toward death.

If our work is infinite—if it will never be at an end—then what’s the point of rushing? Expediting the end of one chore earns us only the privilege of beginning the next. Infinity minus one is still infinity. Therefore speed can’t improve our condition. We might as well take our time with everything we do.

Chronic acceleration can so accustom us to rushing that we no longer need an excuse for it. Even if the activity is pleasant and we have nothing else to do, we automatically try to get it over with as quickly as we can. We stroll urgently through the park, as though our aim were not to stroll but to have strolled. In this state of empty acceleration, we take it for granted that there must be some reason to rush, even though we can’t immediately call it to mind. Empty acceleration is the experience of pure, unconceptualized urgency.

e’ve seen that we often think about our problems too soon or too late, too much or too little. The most elusive error, however, is to concern ourselves with topics that needn’t be thought about at all. In the twin traps of regulation and formulation, we adopt attitudes toward issues that don’t touch our lives, make decisions about events that are just as well left to whim or chance, or purposelessly keep up a blow-by-blow description of the passing scene, as though the movie of reality stood in need of narration.

Whether a particular superfluity of thinking is regulative or formulative depends on the quality of our mental processes. We need to make a distinction here between descriptive and prescriptive thinking. Descriptive thought says what a thing is; prescriptive thought intends that something be. When we make a mental note that the door is open, we’re thinking descriptively; when we resolve to shut it, we’re thinking prescriptively. Regulation is the trap of making useless prescriptions; formulation is useless description. We’ll examine regulation in this chapter and formulation in the next.

A purely descriptive idea leaves us at rest. When we note that the door is open, the matter is at an end. Prescriptive thought, however, urges us to adopt a line of action. Having told ourselves to shut the door, we feel the need to carry out our orders.

But prescriptions aren’t the only wellsprings of action. Living beings are active even when they’re not telling themselves what to do. A mosquito is unlikely to be wending its way through the world by means of prescriptions (“And now to suck his blood!”); yet it manages to sustain a fairly energetic lifestyle. And we humans too are always scratching, stretching, sniffing, and shifting about without telling ourselves to do so. The non-prescriptive sources of action, whatever they are, may simply be called impulse. Our activity, then, is either impulsive or prescriptive, depending on which of the following patterns it adheres to:

Impulsive:

impulse action ( descriptive thought)

Prescriptive:

(impulse ) prescriptive thought action

The parenthetical terms in each case refer to optional events. Scratching on impulse, we may also note descriptively that we are scratching; but our activity doesn’t require such a notation. And a prescribed movement may also be preceded by a redundant impulse to do the same thing, as when we happen to be hungry on our lunch hour.

These modes of action correspond to what an antiquated