| Hi, Jianshuo, I was led here by China Law Blog. Excellent points. As you indicated in the "We are in a hurry,...art work." passage, slowing down and spending more time, THE most luxurious thing in the world, for beauty and grace is seen as an unworthy compromise by a lot of contemporary Chinese people. Just three hours ago, my ex roomie, who just returned from a trip to west Europe, mocked the slow pace in France, Austria, Switzerland and all, you know. "Europe is hopeless. Look at all these people who don't know how to hurry up!" ,she mimiced, in pride and agreement, the words of her guide for the trip. Now, that guide has been living in the SLOW Europe for over ten years and obviously still hasn't started to appreciate the beauty and grace of not living in a hurry. Does slowness really cut competitiveness? Think again. Take coating of a mega vessal. If you work nonstop regardless of the weather, you deliver months ahead of schedule but the ship goes into bad shape very soon. If you go slow, however, the ship will be good for a long long time. Who wins at the end of the day? Now look at the buildings that have been added on China's landscape in the past two decades. Look how badly they age. Look how undesirable a living space those condos from early 90s have become. The cracks, molds in my two-year-old government office building. Look at the nonstop patch work on brand new roads. If you take into account the much faster depreciation rate of things made in a hastily fashion, a lot of time in defiance of sound technical standards, and average out the total investment to a much shorter life span of, say, 60 years, as opposed to 5 centuries or more, which is not too uncommon a life span of old beautiful creations, you'd see that rapid growth not balanced by care for beauty and quality, is costly and erases much of the good deeds it does to people in not too long a timeframe. The tearing down and rebuilding of houses and roads can go on forever to keep the GDP growth look good, of course.But I hardly need to remind you of the resource depletion on the poor planet of Earth. In this calculation, the sacrifice of beauty and grace for now is made in vain. So I wouldn't say, hey, let's wait till we get rich to start caring about beauty and grace. We'd have done too much of a mess to our cities, our Mother Nature, to be able to make a meaningful remedy. I want quality things that last, now. Quality in design, material and workmanship. Beauty. |
Not Be Afraid of Grace and Beauty