ABSTRACT
The availability of speed in modernity produces a desire for speed as the technological marker of an exalted way of life. The resultant compression of time and space reproduces and magnifies disruptions and injustices in human and human-nature relations. The desire for speed also involves displacement of the traditional conception of life as a journey of the mind and soul towards the divine. Whereas much modern travel is organized around tourism travel in the Middle Ages was primarily ordered around pilgrimage. The contrast between the pace of medieval pilgrimage and the speed of modern tourism is significant. Walking involves slow organic movement through a landscape such that the rhythm of movement mirrors the rhythm of the earth and so enacts an embodied analogy of prayer and contemplation. Journeying and mobility in Jewish and Christian traditions are central metaphors of the spiritual quest and of the potential richness of life lived in dependence upon the divine Spirit rather than on the possession of many chariots, or of houses in locations distant from one another. Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages Geoffrey Chaucer 1
For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.
Paul Valery 2