Speed of life
The headline is the title of a BBC documentary film on nature. Its central idea is: the niche of a living organism in the environment is determined by the pace of movement and metabolic processes. A swift and a tortoise do not even suspect of each other’s existence, for they are never destined to cross their paths in space and time. Speed also divides us, people with different dynamic parameters of functioning. It may take one man seven hours to cross an ocean and another to get from a village to the regional center. This is not only the comparison of a linear movement pace, but also a property of world perception. There are a lot of people who can visit several countries in one workweek. They live in one country, work in another, and cross a third en route. Take, for example, the Slovaks employed in Germany. Mobility makes them sure of professional self-realization. But let us stick to speed.
When I began to work in a newspaper, it took three day to put out an issue before a big rotation machine with tin- and lead-cast “pages” was commanded to “go to press.” It was most difficult at the time to relay texts. If there was no teletype unit nearby, we had to look for a telephone and shout into the receiver – syllable by syllable – the words of a report. This procedure seems so outdated that you begin to doubt your passport data. Now, having just one smartphone, you can send texts and photos wherever you want in a jiffy. But let us put off the statement of obvious progress, for the latter is hardly discernible in the context of physical speeds on the territory of our country. It took me 12 hours to travel from Odesa to Lviv 40 years ago. It takes as many hours today, on the same train. A car will take even more: as it grieves you to see it bouncing on potholes, you choose the “Euro 2012-quality detour” via Kyiv instead of the straight beat-up road. The point is that information technologies, which change the world everywhere, have no impact on the laying of asphalt in this country. Yes, we do use the fruits of science produced by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but we ourselves have done nothing to speedily overcome backwardness. It is difficult to explain why we have failed in so many years to lay an Odesa-Lviv road fit for high-speed cars. For even a modest WWII-time truck could make it at 50 km per hour. The communication between small towns and villages needs no explanation at all. I am afraid that politics and the economy are not to blame in this case. We must have misused the time which took Moses to make free people out of slaves.
It seems sometimes that cell phones, computerization, and other technological breakthroughs exist in this country for some isolated spheres that are delinked from ordinary life. We still go to offices for a document the way we used to. As before, we fill up forms and blanks with a ballpoint pen tied to the windowsill with a string. Offices do not need our emails – they need a “living face” in a line, as did pre-revolutionary solicitors and attorneys with a quill behind their ears. Even if the authorities take interest in the virtual world, they do not mean to reduce lines in this way. They cannot drop the habit of controlling. They took hold of material things long ago, they are trying to suppress spiritual things, and now is the turn of the unknown, the digital.
Each of us sometimes associates the state with the large Kyiv buildings, in which big Donetsk bosses work, but more often with those near us – a police station, an out-patient hospital, the Pension Fund, the Tax Inspection… They need up-to-date means of communication just to keep a record, while the rest need these to make calls from the waiting line in order to postpone their urgent business due to the sluggishness of the bureaucratic apparatus. Half a century ago, the state (including offices and the press) was obliged to look into a citizen’s petition within 10 days. Now the law allows dragging feet for up to a month. Indeed, we are living at different speeds depending on the geographical and departmental position. I will say it again that it may take an individual a day to cover the distance between the village and the district center in both directions (100 km on the average). There are no roads or good transportation means, especially in the provinces. It will take the resident of a million-strong regional center the same time to travel to the capital and back. A Kyivite will manage to fly to Beijing or New York in the same 12 hours. The remoteness of the provinces from civilization leaves a business, cultural, and, hence, mental imprint. We are increasingly inclined not to save time, the main resource of human life. The time is hardly running in regional cities and has almost ground to a halt in district centers. People only bustle around in marketplaces, railway stations, and hospitals, but nothing happens in other places. We all know the phrase: “Wait, this problem should be tackled after the elections.” It has been like instructions appended on all the projects of this country’s modernization in the past decade. It is a waiting room, not a state. We are sitting and looking for a high-speed Hyundai to run on the old rail track, while this train not always allows us to save time but always leads in the price of tickets. These Hyundais, now the talk of the town, are an illustration of the state’s attitude to time and space. Whenever it is necessary to speed up things, the system slows down, and when it is necessary to observe schedules and dates and to plan in advance, its inert body begins, for no apparent reason, to balk impatiently and be hot to trot.
It took European countries decades or even centuries to switch from the presidential to the parliamentary model of government. But we have managed to do it both ways in a few years – to give up undivided authority in favor of collective forms and then drop it all and get back to almost monarchic absolutism. This kind of steep turns will make even a pilot feel sick. In all countries, changes to tax codes are introduced gradually to give entrepreneurs the time to adapt. But here the Ukrainian speed beats all the records. You paid taxes yesterday, but they won’t let you sleep quietly – you will wake up in the morning as a debtor under the new rules that were adopted the day before yesterday. The cell phone operator will withdraw money from your account a minute after the call. But when you prove that it made a mistake in calculations, the debt will be refunded in a week’s time. It is not trendy to describe the long processes of labor – preference is made to instantaneous results of enrichment. Our winemakers have learned to make a three-year cognac in 45 days. Let the foreign companies deal with dull ageing, whereas we prefer things as quick as lightning, such as bottling the cognac. We only grow the crops that ripen in one season. Let the Poles wait for apples and pears to grow. We have no time. It’s easier for us to make nine pregnant women give birth in a month!
Let us define our way of existence in terms of the abovementioned BBC film: the Ukrainian state has achieved a high speed in metabolism by way of reducing nervous and muscular activity. This looks like being in lethargic sleep, when you have a never-ending desire to eat and drink. It is about different speeds of the same life. They prompt the immobile body to awaken and be active again. It is time to open eyes and come back from what the British call future in the past to our present and, God willing, continuous tense. There is still a hope, for we are beginning to wake up.
