“The Bliss of Slowness” published by Gütersloher Verlagshaus
„Time is not passing faster than in earlier times, but we do walk by faster.“
George Orwell
On April 22, 2019, German publisher Gütersloher Verlagshaus released a special book: “The Bliss of Slowness” (“Vom Glück der Langsamkeit”) by Quint Buchholz is not just a beautiful coffee-table book. It also communicates a quiet but urgent message that is worth hearing.
On 112 pages, texts by different world-class authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Mascha Kaléko or Friedrich Nietzsche enter into a dialogue with many new and some old pictures by “humanist surrealist” Quint Buchholz (Lena Naumann for mundus). Together they speak about the topic of time, time of a kind that has become rare, maybe even critically endangered: unstructured time, slow time, idle time, time of stillness.
The world, or thus it seems, is turning faster and faster – people keep ceaselessly rushing, accelerating, networking, reshaping, doing. That, in turn, seems to be doing them no good at all – no room remains to pause for a moment and quiet down. To simply be a human being, experiencing the bliss of gazing at the world in wonder.
In this book, Quint Buchholz is pleading for an attentive, yet relaxed approach to the resource of time. He creates islands for his readers, on which, as German poet Christian Morgenstern has aptly phrased it, we once again “feel the pulse of our own hearts. Quietness on the inside, quietness on the outside. Learning anew how to catch our breath, that’s what it is.”
“We do not just turn the page but contemplate the unusual, the more or less irritating, the always slightly fantastic, and feel the bliss of slowness. This is not a book for reading but a book for feeling.”
Sascha Pommrenke, Koreander Der Bücherblog (21. März 2020)
“A poetical plea in texts and images for times lost in dreams, for unscheduled, unmanaged time, for moments of leisure and quietude.”
Udo Watter for Süddeutsche Zeitung (May 3, 2019)
Quint Buchholz
Vom Glück der Langsamkeit
Hardcover 112 pages
€ 20,00 (D)
978-3-579-01466-1
