My sweet jellybean,

I remember looking at old photographs of my great grandparents. I love old photographs. Time, not people, trapped on gorgeous old paper. Perhaps it’s a trick of the trap, or perhaps not, but nobody in the photographs ever looked like they were in a hurry. It could be that photographs, especially 60, 70 years ago, demanded your best face. I still like to think that those were the days of slow and steady. Those were the days of Aesop’s Tortoise.

It’s always a mistake to look at history and say those were the days. Those were never the days. It’s all revised. But I am already afoot with my mistake.

Slow and steady barely ever wins the race anymore. There is very little respect left for slow and steady. Nobody’s got the time for slow. Nobody’s got the patience for steady. Very few people plod after their destinies. We all rocket haphazardly after our dreams.

We’re a culture of quick fixes and quick wins and instant gratification. We want everything and we want it right now. If I could steal one of those sepia-coloured ancestors, rip them from the record, and show them a day the way the world is now what would they make of it?

What would they make of home entertainment systems, Final Fantasy, Internet porn, megamalls, the Cineplex, five second microwaveable bacon, pre-cut, pre-made cookie dough, automatic teller machines, SpellCheck? What would they make of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The Bachelor? The Apprentice? Our celebrity obsession that binds us all?

I think, given the chance, they would run screaming back to their own time. I should very much like to go with them.

It’s a mistake too to want to run away from your own culture, to deny your own time. We get to live in the time we live in; and, what’s more, we get to make of it what we get to make of it. I probably couldn’t handle the butter-churning pace of the past so long as I knew better, so long as I knew otherwise.

Still, I have always contended that nearly everything is worth trying once. I want to be Amish. Just for a little while. I want to live in a barter culture. A barter culture has always made so much sense to me. Maybe there aren’t any barter cultures anymore.

For most people, their quiet lives of earnest plodding, their quiet lives of desperate steadiness will always be out-shouted, outmatched, usurped and bombarded by this Culture of the Hare, by the quick fix, the quick win, the jackpot, the glitz and the blaze of the Fabulous and the Thunderous Life of the Winner, the Champion, the Superstar.

As I get older, I have less and less patience for the child prodigy, for the adolescent pop star, for these tiny, ungrown celebrity empires. Of course it’s envy and resentment.

I love stories of people who developed, who came into their own late in life. It gives me just a modicum of hope that the slow, the steady, the sad tortoise might still make it. Walt Whitman was a journalist of very little remark or reputation until his 40s. Henri Rousseau was a customs officer who painted on Sundays until he retired at 49. By the time he died he was a well known, well-respected artist and best friends with Picasso.

My point, my conclusion, jellybean? Hhm?

The tortoise – assuming he wasn’t fired by Mr. Trump for lacking any sort of natural talent – might still win the race but now he’d look for sponsorship from Adidas or Nike.

SS