By Benjamin Jackson
In 1996, time became frenetic, out-of-control, frightening. The world was balancing on a fulcrum between old and new—notepads giving way to networks, mail to modems, pensions to privatization. In Eastern Europe, the Iron Curtain had recently followed the Berlin Wall in its relegation to the past, and the nations which used to hide behind it were trying to find their new identities in a world which had largely passed it by. And in Boston, as young Naval Reservist and bookstore clerk, I watched my twenty-first birthday loom on a rapidly approaching horizon, just behind it the beginning of a collegiate career, delayed by my naval service, full of uncertainty and trepidation about American future I neither entirely understood nor wanted. The routine of corporate life terrified the young and wild boy in me trying desperately to survive the transition to adulthood. The freedom of a more bohemian life terrified the budding man in me who wanted financial security and the trappings of the American dream. The speed with which either future approached was disquieting.
Milan Kundera, a Czech dissident and novelist, left Czechoslovakia in 1975 for France. He rarely returned to his own country, even during its transformational time when the poet Vaclav Havel was installed as President following a nearly bloodless revolution. In 1996, he must have felt the same hurtling and been similarly disquieted, for it was then that he wrote his novella Slowness. In it, Kundera combined the narrative of an earlier writer—in this case Vivant Denon—with his own creation: a lament on the haste of modern life, and a regretful requiem for a time when speed was not its own virtue. “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” he wonders. “Ah, where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?”
It is somewhat ironic that this book of Kundera’s was his shortest, lightest, and fastest work. I breezed through it in an afternoon, feeling myself wanting to converse with the author about points he made: “Yes, that’s just like me, I…” This, of course, was impossible, and so I read Slowness quickly, lamenting along with the author the passing of what was and the coming of what was to be. It so happened that shortly after finishing the novella, I was presented with an opportunity to travel to Kundera’s homeland. Over the previous summer, my childhood friend Brandon had sojourned to Prague, met a Czech girl, and fallen in love. He planned to return to marry her and asked if I would be able to attend the wedding.
“Ludicrous,” I told him. “I don’t have any money.”
“You hardly need any money in the Czech Republic,” he insisted. “You’ll stay with me, with Julie’s family. And nothing costs any money there!” I remembered the year prior, Levi’s had run a commercial claiming you could trade a pair of their jeans for a car in Prague, and it was decided.
If I was going to Prague, though, I didn’t want it to be solely for a wedding. I recognized that this might be the last time I’d be free enough from responsibility to become a vagabond roaming from mill to mill, sleeping under the stars. I wanted something more than to fly in for several days, drink some Czech beer, and come home spending years telling people how I had “traveled.” I wanted to experience something of the fullness of the country, to amble, to find a handbrake for the speed of life and pull hard. This was to be a pilgrimage away from the future, a journey toward slowing down. As much as possible, I wanted to be the anti-tourist.
International air travel in the years before 9/11 was a less complicated matter than it is today. A bevy of companies existed whose sole function it was to fill unsold seats on commercial aircraft, often for a very cheap price. For a $99 money order, I was able to procure a round-trip voucher on flights-to-be-determined. This method was perfect both for my budget and for my goal of achieving slowness: I told the company that I wanted to depart from the northeast United States during a particular week and head to continental Europe, and vice-versa for my return. In this, the journey itself became a roulette wheel, creating its own context, amorphous until the very last day, when I would receive a phone call telling me to report to a certain city within twenty-four hours. The journey existed, but in a very real sense it did not exist at all. It was a product of the future, conceived in the present but not yet evisible. There was nothing for me to do but wait for it to materialize.
In the month between deciding to go and my actual departure, I took it upon myself to learn some of the Czech language. I procured a set of “Living Language” cassettes and books and set to training my ear in the confoundingly difficult Slavic tongue. There were sounds which simply did not exist in English which existed in nearly every word in Czech. The “ř”, for example, combines a rolled “r” sound with a hard “j” in the middle. I spent hours practicing it, and never once came close to achieving the maddening dental dexterity necessary to reproduce it. Diphthongs moved from their usual position behind vowels to unexpected places, hidden between the nasal “n”s and sharp “i”s which connect consonants in the language. I did learn an increasingly useless collection of responses to the question “How are you?”:
“Mám se dobře, ale moje matka má hlad.” (I am well, but my mother is hungry.)
“Chtěl bych najít obchod se zvířaty.” (I would like to find a pet store.)
“Dnes špatně. Bolí mě v krku. Ale jsem rád, že jsem tady.” (Today badly. I have a sore throat. But I am happy I am here.”)
It was a perfect lesson for an American traveling to a country with lesser financial means. Each answer to the question “how are you?” was answered by a problem for the asker to solve. None of the answers ended with “but enough about me—how are you?” The linguistic center in the American language lesson was the traveler. I was not learning to converse, I was learning to impose.
Time hurtled. I studied, arranged for a six-week leave from the Navy and gave notice at the bookstore, and on the appointed day packed thoroughly and neatly. The Navy had taught me many things, and how to pack was among them. The phone rang. I answered. I was going to Luxembourg, from Boston, via Reykjavik.
Reykjavik
“When we rush into sensual pleasure, we blur all the delights along the way.” – Milan Kundera, Slowness
The first leg of the flight, a nearly-full IcelandAir jetliner, was five hours coasting over jet-black ocean toward an eastern sun. The plane departed Boston at nine o’clock in the evening, passengers mixed between those giddy with the anticipation of going to sleep in the sky and awakening on the new horizon and those for whom travel was a tiresome necessity of obligation. I was a trifle annoyed at the layover: I had hoped to have a full day to hitchhike toward my destination, but the four-hour layover and extra distance would consume much of those hours. The dark ocean seemed immeasurably vast: there is something larger about unoccupied space. If we were traversing over nothing, why should it take so long? The shifting time zones compounded the problem. By leaving at nine in the evening, I was scheduled to arrive at my almost-arctic waypoint just after six the following morning. Five hours was the same as nine hours. Time stretched; space existed only as space.
I was bored.
I pulled out my trusty Kundera and began at the beginning, with a driver on a motorcycle who was impatiently waiting to pass the novella’s narrator.
“The man hunched on his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight: he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.” I, too, was so wrenched: was the absence of fear boredom? I was not freed of the future, I just seemed stuck in an eternal present: each moment was the same as the last and the next. Until, at least, boredom begat sleep, and looping over an eternal ocean, I dreamt.
A change in pressure roused me, and the spell of the eternal night was broken. A blazing pink sunrise over the horizon cast its light over the ochre cliffs, announcing the island that was racing upwards to meet us out of the steel-gray sea. Slowing on approach to the runway, it felt as though we were moving faster than at any point in our journey: the formerly endless space beneath us was populated with trees and fields, then houses, cars, businesses, punctuated by the runway. The closer to the ground we were, the faster the world rushed by, as if proximity to the earth determined the passage of time and the size of space—gravity as accelerant.
It was in deplaning that I had my first sense of being in a foreign land. Instead of an air-conditioned mechanical jetway which takes travelers directly from the plane to the terminal in the states, we descended down a rickety, industrial steel stairway maneuvered to the exit door by two men who stood at its base, feet blocking the wheels as we climbed down onto the tarmac. A brisk walk led us to another steel stairway, which rang with our steps as we climbed into the terminal.
It was underwhelming: folding metal chairs existed in random groupings around the three gates, centered around a gilded statue of Leif Erikson which dominated the center of the plaza. On one end stood a duty-free “shop,” consisting of two racks of liquor, and on the other, blissfully, a bar. Despite the early hour, it was nearly full, but this is the advantage of traveling alone: there is a single empty stool at almost every bar. I quickly made it my own.
Disappointingly, the beer selection was entirely American. More disappointingly, the small group of young men to my right were also Americans. I had hoped to hear different languages and taste different foods, but here at least it was not to be. Instead, we smoked American cigarettes and drank American beer and discussed American sports teams. And yet, the announcements of flights rang over the intercom in Icelandic first, and then English. At a closer examination, the crowds sitting in the folding chairs of the terminal were decidedly international, some wearing styles which did not quite match the American ideal, others speaking in languages which floated up to the ceiling of the room like a breeze carrying the scent of a flower not familiar to those who inhale it.
Sitting, watching, I began to experience instead of simply see. Perhaps this was the point of the layover: to place a foot in two worlds. American beer, American English; with the rest of the world one step closer. When the call came to board the flight to Luxembourg, the Americans next to me settled their tab and made their way to the gate. I ambled after.
Luxembourg
“He is tired to death. He longs to stretch out on the bed and sleep, but he cannot risk not waking up in time. He must leave in an hour, no later.” – Milan Kundera, Slowness
This flight was spent in line, waiting for the one unsold smoking seat to vacate so that I might sit down, smoke a cigarette, and return once again to the end. One of the Americans from the bar was in front of me in the queue, and we joked as we waited. He and his friends were headed to Amsterdam, for the reasons young Americans went to Amsterdam. They wanted no ambling, rather, they wanted the rush of the forbidden. When we landed in Luxembourg, his compatriots and I decided to meet for a drink in the city before going our separate ways.
That drink turned into several, and the afternoon passed quickly. Because the sun had traveled much of the way back to Boston, I decided to start the truly slow part of my journey the following day, and instead purchased a Eurail ticket to Frankfurt.
Frankfurt
“Suffering, then, is the fundamental notion of hedonism: one is happy to the degree that one can avoid suffering.” – Milan Kundera, Slowness
The train rolled into the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof just as the sun was setting. The ride had been unremarkable aside from the food: real bread and cheeses, sausages that did not come out of the Amtrak blister packs of home, best suited for freezers and dumpsters. I could have gladly eaten in the dining car for days if the price was not quite so high. It was a welcome distraction from the otherwise entirely familiar blur of countryside rolling past the window. I do not know what I expected, but I did not think this part of Europe would look so midwestern.
I changed some of my money into Deutschmarks at the station and found a payphone to call home and let my family know I was alive. This was where the naïve foreigner first appeared: I dialed the number and waited for the instructions on how to proceed: “fünf mark bitte,” came the automated voice across the line. I pulled a coin out of my pocket and inserted it into the phone. I did not realize that coins, so valueless in America, were not so little in Europe. The call required an additional five marks, and by the time I was done I had spent about $15.00 on a very short phone call: the same $15 I was to have spent for my room in the hostel. Realizing my mistake, I returned to the currency exchange.
The delay proved to be costly, as by the time I arrived at the hostel, it had closed for the night. Not having the money to spend on a German hotel—things may not have cost much in the Czech Republic, but this was not so in Germany—I looked at my map and weighed my options. I was exhausted, having only achieved a few hours of sleep on the first leg of my flight, and I did not want to go far. Nearby was the Olympic Stadium, still referred to as such despite the 1936 Olympics it was built to host moving to Berlin before the event. Surrounding the stadium appeared to be a forest, and I made my way there to camp for the night.
I found a clearing several hundred yards into the woods and set up my tent by moonlight. Soon, I was in my sleeping bag, drifting. It was then that I heard footsteps, quietly crinkling in the dead leaves around the tent. “Wie gehts?” I called to the night but received no reply. I perceived the flurry of footsteps coalescing around the tent and I trembled. Leaving the shelter seemed more dangerous than staying inside, as if the thin nylon would provide protection from a German villain. I pulled out my tiny Swiss army knife. “Ich habe ein messer!”—I have a knife—I shouted. The footsteps crackled in the leaves.
This is how the slow night passed. I cowered and yelled; my tormenters silently circled in the dark. We remained in stalemate until the sun rose, and I found courage in the light, burst out of my tent ready to do battle. There was nobody there. Had I been menaced by some nocturnal German witch? Had the light itself rescued me from a supernatural foe? I heard footsteps again but saw nothing at first. Then, a low darting from the corner of my eye, and another. I looked down, and observed a colony of field mice, darting through the leaves, which crinkled like the footsteps of Grimhild in the night.
Exhausted, I laughed at myself. Today was not the day for slowness, after all. I returned to the Hauptbahnhof and purchased a ticket to Prague.
Prague
“Speed is the form of ecstasy the technological revolution has bestowed on man.” – Milan Kundera, Slowness
Prague in 1996 was a city which belonged to the future. It was old, and looked the way we Americans imagine Europe, with its old town full of stone buildings capped with orange tile roofs, winding streets speckled with churches which are centuries older than any stone building in the United States. It was also a new city, but new in the Warsaw Pact way: squat concrete buildings which were all function and no form, brutalist apartments that looked like cement Legos which were there for the proletariat to sleep and eat, but never to love or create. The people of Prague had very little, with high unemployment and low wages, but they had hope in abundance, and hope is by definition a willingness to ignore present circumstances in the belief that they will deliver something better.
When the Communists left, they destroyed much of the property they seized when they took power. The government was slowly returning it to its rightful owners or their descendants, and this also made Prague a city of the past. Every moment was an archeological dig—not into an ancient civilization, but to the one which had just ended. Take the cosmonaut statue in Háje, a neighborhood on the far reaches of the city. Located just outside the Metro station, people would walk by it every day on their way into and out of the city proper. Rather than destroy this relic of a hated past, however, they transformed it—in the brief time I was there, it was painted over repeatedly in bright pastels, vivid colors, setting it apart from the dull concrete dwellings which dominated the neighborhood.
It was in one of these dwellings that Juliš Adamová, my friend’s fiancée, lived with her family.
Her father, Václav Adam, was a reedy man with a ruddy beard. He learned English from reading The Prague Post, the city’s English newspaper, and from listening to black market Frank Zappa records as a teenager. One of those records was playing when I first arrived at their flat: “Joe’s Garage.”
“Hey man,” he said to me, with an effusive handshake. “Tak, today, no need to be sober.” He led me to the kitchen, where he and Brandon were deep into a bottle of fernet. His wife Eva puttered around, having just returned from the lunch rush at Ü Pod Křídlem, the restaurant she managed in the city. Eva spoke no English, but had a few words of German, which allowed us to say a brief and awkward hello. The afternoon was spent in a bit of a fernet-and-exhaustion-fueled haze, a delirium accentuated by the accents, by the unfamiliar flavors of the pork, kraut, and dumplings Eva brought out for the family to eat, and by the rapid-fire Czech of Juliš translating for her mother. As the sun set, they noticed me setting as well, and led me to a small bed in a small bedroom once occupied by their older daughter who no longer lived at home.
This week was not the time for slowness. The wedding was to be held over the weekend, and the family was busy with preparations. While I had little to do, I was tied to a place and an event, leaving no space for the extended loafing I had envisioned. Václav tried to have informed discussions about American politics, but the news he received was either poorly translated or simply created out of whole cloth. “Is it true about Bill Clinton’s gay son?” he asked once? “No, I know he has son. It was in Prague Post!” I imagined this was a relic of the propaganda days, when the state newspapers had to be believed, and the consequences for contradicting them would have been harsh—especially for a man who was discovered with subversive American music. Often, Brandon and Juliš would be away in the city attending to the many bureaucratic requirements of an international wedding, and I would be left alone in the flat with Eva, who was always hard at work.
I wanted to be helpful but lacked the words. Looking up “help” in my Living Language guides, I tried “Já pomoc?” She looked alarmed. “Pomoc” is apparently the word one uses when one needs help in an emergency. It is not to offer assistance. In fact, the language guides did not offer a term for “can I help you?” These were books for tourists, and tourists do not help, they demand. I was trapped by tourist language, and instead set out to explore.
I took the Metro into the Old City, near the River Vltava. Here was where the great Kings of the Renaissance ruled, where Charles University educated some of the greatest minds of the time, where wars were planned and faiths clashed. Here was also where Ü Krále Jiřího—King George’s Pub—was located, downstairs from the James Joyce, which was the only bar charging American prices in the city. Ü Krále Jiřího was the opposite of the James Joyce. Hidden down a dark and narrow flight of stone stairs was a room about fifteen feet long and only eight feet wide, filled by one long picnic table. Seated around the table was an international crew, made up of Czechs, Australians, oneNamibian, and a smattering of others who decided to descend into the pub. Adorning the walls on either side of the table was a crudely rendered painting of the American flag, captioned in Czech and English: “Est. 1350. Our beer is 400 years older than your country.”
This was my kind of place. That beer, a full-flavored Pilsner better than any I had ever tasted, cost about a nickel a pint. Most things in Prague were like that—dvacet koruna—twenty crowns. Conversing around the table, the beer arriving on great trays delivered by a stout barkeeper from a hidden taproom, we found freedom from the confines of our respective languages. Few of us were fluent in each other’s tongues, but each of us knew at least a few words in several. We would often shift languages mid-sentence when we ran out of the right words, trying three or four times before the table got the gist. Here was my first taste of slowness—a conversation reined in by constant translation, laughter occurring in sequence as each person understood their respective parts, understanding slowly building instead of arriving instantaneously with speech. There was a new richness to the conversations which would never have existed in America. This same experience would have driven us crazy in New York: we would have spoken slower and louder until we threw our hands up in frustration.
“What do you call a person who speaks three languages?” the Namibian asked me.
“Trilingual,” I replied. He nodded and smiled. His English was excellent.
“What about two languages?”
“Bilingual, of course.”
“And one language?”
“Monolingual?” I was unsure.
“No, American!” I laughed, and he repeated the routine for the others—each one looking at me and laughing, and me swearing at them good naturedly in their own language.
So passed the week.
The wedding was the most American experience I had in Europe. Aside from the language, which was in Czech first and English second, it was entirely familiar: the procession, the vows, the kiss, the celebration. I was happy for my friends, but also very much outside. Brandon was the only person I knew well, and I was the only American who traveled to the nuptials. This was no Ü Krále Jiřího, and the strangers made little effort to include me. I was glad the next day when they left for their honeymoon. I was freed of the obligations of friendship to stay in one place.
Loafing Heroes, Wandering Vagabonds
“’You’re from the eighteenth century?’
‘Yes, and you?’
‘Me? The twentieth.’ Then he adds: ‘The end of the twentieth.’ And he adds further: ‘I’ve just spent a marvelous night.’” – Milan Kundera, Slowness
The day following the wedding, I was back at Ü Krále Jiřího, drinking with the international crew. One of the Aussies told me there was a concert featuring a Czech band called Yellow Dog—all the rage in the country at that time—in the small town of Kutná Hora to the south and west of Prague in three weeks. He and his crew were planning to attend, and asked me to meet them. I immediately agreed, excited to have the opportunity to finally meander some. I’d spend the intervening time hitchhiking around the countryside, discovering whatever presented itself to me, and connect with them at the concert.
It was in these few days that I learned why we no longer have the wandering heroes and loafing vagabonds that Kundera so missed and which I had so romanticized. This type of life is centered on roads, and in a very real sense roads are nowhere. Nobody wants to go and meet at a road. Roads are the method of transit between spaces. When one pulls off to stop on the side of the road it is usually because something has gone wrong, or to look at something beautiful that is distant from the road. A life on the road is a life between spaces, stuck in a waypoint, burning in the sun, soaking in the rain, and experiencing nothing of the world. Being on the road is the opposite of being anywhere at all.
The road is unpleasant. Blistered feet and sunburn amplify the misery of boredom. Watching cars stream by, ignoring your extended thumb, leads to worry about water and food and shelter. When you have read the book which brought you to this place enough, you curse it. The book takes you nowhere: it is the car that refuses to stop, full of music fans and air conditioning, but empty of you. The road is resentment.
It was, however, in this period of days that I visited a town called Český Krumlov in Bavaria, where a grandson had just received his grandfather’s castle, nestled snug on a lake, and seriously damaged by the Communist governor who occupied it before fleeing the country. I spent a day helping the owner rebuild a balcony overlooking a grand internal theater along with other travelers, and together we feasted on spaghetti and rohliki, sweet Czech rolls filled with poppy seeds. During these days I traveled to Plzeň and drank my fill in the birthplace of Pilsner. It was here where I met a German cab driver and his beautiful sister, with whom I ate psychedelic mushrooms in an underground jazz club and watched the music swirl in the night air. At a rest stop off a highway near the Austrian border, I told a Roma woman “no” over and over again as she tried to get me to buy the gaudiest ring I had ever seen when she and her family materialized seemingly out of thin air and circled around me. Her children darted between my legs under the picnic table where I had been eating my lunch of fried cheese and Fanta.
And finally, it was during these days I vagabonded back through Prague, newly plastered in “King of Pop” posters for a forthcoming Michael Jackson concert, and out to Kutná Hora. The Australians and the Namibian were at a bar in the town square, which was filled with long benches facing a stage at one end. We were joined by a Czech friend of theirs who went by Hašiš (pronounced like the drug hashish, although I never found out if that was her real name), and the Jazz Club Germans, whom I had apparently invited. We spent the day conversing over beer, and when the concert drew near ambled out to find seats on benches at the back of the square.
The concert was underwhelming—garage band rock of my parents’ era—but it was after the concert that the night became magic. The Australian said he knew a place to camp nearby, and we walked a mile up a lonely road under a moonless sky. Soon we could smell water, and he turned us down a small access path. After a hundred yards or so through thick woods, we emerged into a breathtaking clearing. Above, the brightest stars shone down out of a forever sky, the Milky Way slashing violet through its center. Down a gentle slope a reed-lined lake lapped invitingly at the shore. At the far end of the clearing, two abandoned trailers sank into the grass. We all marveled, took off our shoes and felt the soft earth under our bare soles.
We decided to forgo the tents—this sky was too special not to sleep under. Instead, we spent the night living as the young live. We drank and sang, danced and skinny-dipped in the Edenesque waters. We fashioned our own perfect night, laughing into the eternity sky, slowing, ever slowing. There was nothing to rush to, and nothing to run from. There was this moment, an ecstasy not of speed but of stillness, of a perfect eternity we imagined in an evening. And when we were spent, we slept, the night carrying starlight to our skin.
The buzzing began at dawn. A distant hum that grew more insistent, like an alarm clock that grows louder the longer it is ignored. I was a master at ignoring alarm clocks and continued to doze until I heard the first scream. I joined the group in jumping naked to our feet into the middle of a swarm of millions of bees and sprinted toward the water, swatting and swearing and trying not to breathe them in. We were nearly a third of the way across the shallow lake before the bees left us.
It was the trailers. Whether they had once been commercial hives that had been abandoned, or had simply been appropriated by a new master, they were home to millions of stinging bees jealous of their territory. Every time one of us moved toward the land, an angry finger of menacing insects would point toward the perpetrator and drive them back into the water. There is no shore farther away than that which one can see but not reach. It looms and recedes at the same time, the sound of each lapping wave tantalizing and terrifying. Reeds rustle on a distant wind, offering an untrue hand of friendship. The sun passes across the sky, the shore does not move, and neither do we. By the time dusk came and the bees retreated, we were blue, shivering, empty, and distant. We gathered our things and left.
Litost
“Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Finally, then, it becomes apparent that this was not a trip about slowness at all. This was a trip about forgetting an unwanted future for a time, ignoring uncertainty, and running away from stagnation. Slowness would not have taken me from that. Speed, the ecstasy of motion, this was the trip. The incident with the bees turned it, pointed it back to the west, a sudden reminder that the future remains inescapable. Nothing after that moment stands out in the Czech Republic. I have no memory of crossing the border back into Germany as I headed to Paris, the place from which a voice over the phone told me I was to depart. I don’t remember happiness, community, or anything other than the pull of home, and the push of dissatisfaction with the options I saw lying in front of me. I could not stay, I did not want to stay, but neither did I want to go. I was suddenly aware of the state of my unhappiness.
But planes fly on schedules, and it is there in Paris where this story ends. An Australian woman from the travel company met me and other travelers in a café, where she refused to let us use our Americanized French and ordered Croissants and strong coffee for us. On the plane back, I was seated next to a woman from the Midwest, experiencing her own litost. We spoke about our struggles, about the man she was leaving behind and the man she was flying toward. We talked about the changing world, and the static sky, the eternal flight and its impending end. We held hands, willing the ocean to slow down, but knowing our wish gave it speed.
Ben Jackson is a father, writer, educator, and producer. In addition to teaching writing at Georgia Southern University, he co-hosts and produces the podcast Alyssa Milano: Sorry Not Sorry. His work can be found in The Boston Globe, The Hill, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Page Turner Magazine, The Horror Tree, and other venues. He lives in Savannah.