The Four Horsemen of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons... I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don't get measured and can't be bought.
Fray Luis de León, the great humanist scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, one of the sages of Salamanca University, was condemned by the Inquisition for translating the Song of Solomon and spent four years in prison before being allowed to return to his lectern, where he began his first lecture with the phrase, "Decíamos ayer": "As we were saying yesterday..."