A Fable For Our Time

Several months back, my fellow Radarite Allison Randal used this space to tell us five things we may not have known about here. Coming in at #2: "I study a new language every year. This year is Afrikaans." I find that impressive, especially considering I have trouble being competent in just one language.

My much less ambitious, but I think somewhat similar, habit is that every year I embark on a big reading project. Last year was my umpteenth go-round through Proust's In Search of Lost Time (the recent Penguin translation is less smooth than the classic Modern Library one, if you're interested). This year I'm rereading the 13-volume cycle of Chekhov's stories. In one of those stories, a doctor comforts a patient by telling her that her overwhelming, paralyzing sadness isn't her fault. He blames it on the world around them. The injustice caused by the world? It's moving too quickly. This story was written more than 100 years ago. You think things are too fast now, Radar readers? Every generation has felt that way.

The next generation will, too, it appears. At D last week, my friend Jesse told me a funny story about how his five-year-old daughter sometimes gets the morals of fables wrong. His best example was that she said the moral of “The Tortoise and the Hare” was that “fast and steady win the race.” We laughed, he walked away. After he was gone, I thought: Hey, she’s right. In our current business and technology environment, fast and steady are precisely what win the race. Many great slogans are a happy accident; this is no exception.