In his book Slowness, Kundera gives this ingenious dissection of our obsession with speed:
…the man hunched over 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 state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries…As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.
Memory and consciousness are precious; they give you the context, the dimensions, the latitude and the longitude to reflect on everything you experiences. The unreflected life is not worth living, says Socrates. But when you flip the coin, get rid of all you memory and self-consciousness, will you arrive in hell? On the contrary, you get Kundera’s ecstasy of speed. Actually, I’d rather call it the ecstasy of escape. When you think about it, speed, ski, movies, alcohol, drug, orgasm, rock n’ roll, all these hobbies and obsessions that make you high, all they really do is send you away. They drag you out of you everyday life, set you free from your body and its desires, and push your soul to drift. It’s like riding the train: you are traveling from point A to point B without giving an effort, without a direct purpose or a destination. You can stick your head out of the window like a dog, you can inhale the wind, and say hello to the passing by electric poles, trees, cows, stars, mountains, rivers, and tunnels…You don’t want to arrive anywhere, and you wish the train goes on forever. In fact, if I were the guy in Groundhog Day, I would just take a train ride every day. Life can be kind of wonderful. In this sense, death is not so scary and different after all.
So what is all this about? It’s about music. Hehe, slack and fainthearted as I often am, I found music my favorite way to escape. Certain combinations of rhythm and melody send me directly on train. Like Van Hunt’s Dust, Remy Shand’s Rocksteady, and Movin Gaye’s Where are we going. They all have the magic to tune me into ecstasy for about 4 minutes. The train never arrives as long as the music goes on, and on, and on………”I am dust blown away over the edge…”