In too much of a hurry to look

Alec Bings, the boy who sees through things, is telling Milo about the city of Reality. Its people once strolled and admired it, until someone discovered that walking fast and looking at nothing but your shoes got you where you were going more quickly.

⊕I felt a poignancy here: the stack of urgencies in a day can crowd out my ability to see the beauty of my place, the area I live in.“No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all.”

[…]

“Hasn’t anyone told them?” asked Milo.

“It doesn’t do any good,” Alec replied, “for they can never see what they’re in too much of a hurry to look for.”