Hurry up and wait is my favorite baseball expression, and it’s one that, of course, doesn’t pertain only to our nation’s pastime. (Something to ponder: Is baseball still considered America’s national pastime? I’m not sure anymore. Perhaps the years went away and I yet remained.)
This summer has been a summer of travel for me, which thereby means it’s been a summer of waiting to exit or waiting to enter, waiting to leave or waiting to start. San Francisco, London, Brussels, Bruges, Amsterdam, Berlin, Omaha—and next week back to Oregon, where I live. Total number of delayed flights: five. Total number of delayed trains, trolleys or trams: two. Number of trains that came early, thereby causing me to miss them: one.
As both an antsy traveler and someone who likes an itinerary, a set schedule, delays should throw salt in my game—and they do. But in my cranky oldish age, I’ve also realized that a delay enforces its own opportunities, its own rich sources of pondering and scrutiny. Under the right circumstances, eavesdropping and people-watching are better than a good TV show or movie, and, consciously and unconsciously, I frequently engage in each of those acts passionately. To wit:
While waiting in line for my own admission, seeing a man and a woman in front of me at the Tate Modern Museum in London—the former in his late twenties, the latter in her late forties; both somewhat bashfully holding hands—explain Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings to both themselves and all in earshot: “He basically painted big blobs of color that were also big blobs of emotion. That’s it, you know.” “I know. I get it. I know. I said that. But I still just…I don’t really care. That type of stuff just, like, irks me.”
Or while waiting for the train to Berlin, overhearing snippets of passersby conversations: “Well, right now at least he’s dead. He’s totally dead right now.” “I want the black, not the brown, doyouunderstandme? I WILL NOT ACCEPT THE BROWN.” Waiting for a plane to Omaha and seeing a family of six slowly move past me as I charged my computer was heartening, as the youngest three members of the group were holding hands; if I had to guess, I’d say the one of the little girls was four, the little boy was six, and the other little girl was seven or eight.
All of the above incidents didn’t necessarily change my mind about waiting; like everyone else, ninety-nine percent of the time I hate to do it. But if I hadn’t had to wait I wouldn’t have overheard and observed, and if that had been the case, I think I would have been worse off. For a writer, surreptitious eavesdropping and people-watching can often activate the imagination in fruitful ways—and that’s one of the great things about being a writer. Even when we’re waiting, we can, if we choose, still be working.
Waiting while traveling also allowed me to read quite a bit, definitely more than I would have if all my flights, trains, trolleys, and trams had been on time. By Olivia Laing, the books The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking and The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. The former book I found fascinating and somewhat shocking; discussing the serenity of Raymond Carver’s late-in-life home near Morse Creek in Port Angeles, Washington, Laing writes, “All those bad things you’d done, back in another life: they might rinse away out here, given a landscape so explicitly devoted to the display of time’s long reach. Watching water work through rock, you might come to a kind of accommodation with the fact that you’d once smashed your wife’s head repeatedly against the sidewalk for looking at another a man; that you’d hit her with a wine bottle, severing an artery and causing her to lose almost sixty percent of her blood.” (Jesus.)
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is as much about art’s fundamental isolation as it is about the author’s own particular scope of loneliness. Refreshingly, Laing repeatedly states that being lonely isn’t a bad thing; for me, at least, this was a subtle revelation. In many cases, being lonely can be necessary, integral to one’s sense of self; if you’ve never felt loneliness, there’s a case to be made that you’ve never felt fully alive. Further, as Laing opines on the book’s final page, “I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.” When we’re in a stable relationship or in the midst of a large social setting we can also feel shatteringly lonely and, through a variety of different means, Laing does an excellent job of drawing this point out. The Lonely City also introduced me to a couple of artists—namely David Wojnarowicz and Klaus Nomi—whose work I’ve subsequently searched out and been enlightened by.
I read other books while waiting as well—I Love Dick by Chris Kraus; the play One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace. Nineteen years after its initial publication, it’s gratifying to see I Love Dick garner a readership far beyond its relatively meager initial one. (I myself bought the book in the Heathrow airport in London, where it was featured on a mildly confusing-to-make-sense-of “Top 100 Fiction Books” shelf). One Flea Spare was also heartening to read, albeit in a very different way from I Love Dick. Set in a quarantined merchant’s house in London in 1665, during the horrors of of the Great Plague of London, Wallace’s play A) made me happy for modern medicine and B) made clear to me how truly difficult it is to write a staunchly narrative play that yet contains a significant amount of lyrical poetry. One Flea Spare is a dramatic period piece wrapped in a prose poem, and as a poet and aspiring playwright, I’m very glad to have read it.
With all the waiting, I was even able to do some re-reading as well, something that is a bit of a rarity for me. A Book of Surrealist Games by Alastair Brotchie. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. About these I have little to say, other than that decades after they were first brought into the world, I still think both are great.
Hurry up and wait. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a point where, when I find out that my flight is delayed or even canceled, I rejoice and savor the moment. As previously stated, I hate waiting, plain and simple, especially when, as I often do, I have some place to be. But my travels this summer did open up what the world of waiting can, constructively, do for someone willing to envelop the wait rather than stubbornly tolerate it. For that I’m grateful. I’m also glad to soon be back home in Oregon, where I can do my waiting on my own time, at my own leisure.