In Paul Virilio's Museum of Accidents

Sustained thinking--the kind once recommended and practiced by Wallace Stevens ("a man must think two hours a day")--is now impossible, the idea of thinking for two hours a day unimaginable: perhaps 15 minutes at most. The idea is squeezed on from both sides, the individual and the collective. The individual is individually distracted by the collective, a collective that has detemined that thinking has little value, that whatever value it has is to be assessed monetarily. Schemers are worth more than dreamers. The speed that Virilio identified as the signature of our age is predatory: speed is now the system, thinking a means primarily for assessing the relative value of consumables so that the thinker can make the right 'buy', select among the onrushing parade of material possibilities the thing or things just right for him or for her. We live now in the nature of more, we can never have enough, the speed at which we can now access the world we've made precludes thought. The idea of sitting quietly in a room alone for one hour, proscribed in the 17th century by a philosopher no less, as the cure for all mankind's ills, is so extreme as to seem impossible: not only impossible but undesirable. One sits alone now to empty oneself, not to think but to meditate, a completely different thing. In such a state a thinker may think, how much does history really matter? knowing he's been advised to stay in the present, and that it's best that he do so. Two hours of thinking a day, a little longer than the length of a feature-length movie and a little less than a flight from San Francisco to Denver. To stare out a window for two hours is a start. The little birds you see will lead you somewhere you never thought you'd be.  

Piet Mondrian in studio, New York City, 1940s.