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here, so the primary means of locomotion—walking and riding a donkey—set the lived-time tempo; they define the parameters of fast and slow. Here nothing can speed by outside the window of a motor vehicle, so there are no fragmentary scenes of faces and objects that remain perpetually unfinished, no mosaics forever missing critical tiles.
    Because the island is a string of mountains and the terrain is rocky down to the shore, the pathways are mostly steps up and down, making walking relatively slow, both to avoid stumbling and to conserve energy. And because these paths twist sharply around boulders and houses, the passing view is divided into complete and comprehensible scenes. In only a matter of a few calendar days here, my internal clock adopts this tempo, and along with that comes a slowed-down appreciation of just about everything—of what I hear and see around me and of the feeling of the movements of my body.
    Old people move slowly. Our rocky terrain is internal—fragile bones, faltering muscles, weakened hearts. As our slowness is a result of these failings, it is often viewed as a failing too—our feebleness on slow-motion display.
    But simply because we old folks are forced into slower ­movements—as, for different reasons, Hydriots are—does that mean it is not a good thing? Being in this place where my old man’s gait is matched step-by-step all around me, I now realize that I habitually fight against a leisurely pace; I resist giving in to slowness. This has been yet another of my unconscious conformities to the “forever young” ethos. Yet now it seems quite clear to me that slowness has extraordinary virtues.
    Moving slowly has a grace to it that I find I can easily settle into. I feel fluent in slow motion. There is even something aesthetic about it, a flowing quality reminiscent of a tai chi ­sequence yet without that exercise’s strict discipline. At times, climbing unhurriedly out of my chair, first testing my balance, then rising carefully to my feet and walking in measured steps to the window, I feel like I am performing an old man’s natural, graceful dance. Impulse and movement match. Yes, I am giving in to a limitation of old age, but it does not feel like a defeat at all. In fact, sometimes it feels downright dignified.
    Epicurus would have us savor each moment of our lives to the maximum, and fully savoring our experiences requires time. Sure, one reason I chew this chunk of Dimitri’s lamb slowly is because of my erratic dentures. But this slow chewing also adds to my delight in this morsel; slowness is its relish.
    In her essay on time, Hoffman contrasts slow “lived time” with her first experience of American time when she immigrated to the United States: “It was not only that time moved faster in America—it pressed onwards in more stressful ways.” She observed American time’s relationship to American anxiety: “Everyone suffered from the stress of not doing enough, or the possibility of doing more, or at least feeling good or guilty about it.”
    It is this time pressing onward that the forever young often choose as their “lived time,” the tempo they set for the final stage of their lives. Indeed, from this viewpoint lived time may press onward with particular urgency, the urgency that comes from the knowledge that we are running out of time; we experience a kind of panicky
kairós
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    ON BOREDOM IN OLD AGE
    The forever young have a compelling reason for opting for ­hurried time: it is their primary strategy for combating time’s chronic tormentor—boredom. And next to illness and death, boredom is what we fear most in old age.
    Nothing appears quite so potentially boring as being an old man without any new goals or upcoming exciting experiences, an old man without the buzz of a hungry libido, an old man whose energy level is gradually sinking to the point where the prospect of