carl honoré IN PRAISE OF SLOWNESS Challenging the Cult of Speed To Miranda, Benjamin and Susannah  There is more to life than increasing its speed. Gandhi co ntents  epigraph iii introduction The Age of Rage 1 one Do Everything Faster 19 two Slow Is Beautiful 37 three Food: Turning the Tables on Speed 53 four Cities: Blending Old and New 85 five Mind/Body: Mens Sana in Corpore Sano 119 six Medicine: Doctors and Patience 147 seven Sex: A Lover with a Slow Hand 166 eight Work: The Benefits of Working Less Hard 187 nine Leisure: The Importance of Being at Rest 216 ten Children: Raising an Unhurried Child 246 conclusion Finding the Tempo Giusto 273 Notes 283 Resource List 292 Acknowledgments 297 Index 298 About the Author Cover Copyright About the Publisher introduction the age of rage  People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it. —William Dean Howells, 1907 On a sun-bleached afternoon in the summer of 1985, my teenage tour of Europe grinds to a halt in a square on the outskirts of Rome. The bus back into town is twenty minutes late and shows no sign of appearing. Yet the delay does not bother me. Instead of pacing up and down the side- walk, or calling the bus company to lodge a complaint, I slip on my Walkman, lie down on a bench and listen to Simon and Garfunkel sing about the joys of slowing down and mak- ing the moment last. Every detail of the scene is engraved on my memory: two small boys kick a soccer ball around a medieval fountain; branches scrape against the top of a stone wall; an old widow carries her vegetables home in a net bag. Fast-forward fifteen years, and everything has changed. The scene shifts to Rome’s busy Fiumicino 1