On March 15, 1991, R.E.M. played a secret show at the Borderline in London. Three years later, songs from that set found their way onto a mix tape that a friend made for me during our freshman year in college, which became so warped from constant listening that it sounded like the songs had been recorded underwater. It took another three years to find my own copy of the double CD set from that secret show, a task that involved walking into every record store in every city I visited until I found it in a shop on Bleeker Street in New York for fifty dollars. It was an unimaginable sum for a recent graduate but one I rationalized by amortizing it over the previous three years of searching and the indefinite future years of listening. When I pulled it out of the stacks, incredulous at finally holding in my hand something I had begun to suspect might not exist, I half expected angels to sing.
This was before there was Wi-Fi in every house, before there was a computer in everyone’s pocket, when information was hard-earned and precious and you sometimes had to sort through microfiche to get it. Music and books and movies had a certain materiality, lent to them by the objects that delivered them to us: the giant PLAY and RECORD buttons on our boom boxes that had to be held down simultaneously to capture the song we wanted next on our mix tape once it finally came on the radio; the yellowing card at the back of every library book filled with signatures of all the people who’d had it before you, the dates of its residency in their homes hand-stamped in red on a drunken diagonal by the librarian; the glass window on a top-loading VCR through which you could watch the tape looping from one spool to the other.
Inconvenience was our chief filter for importance. There was no way to search the Internet for a little-known bootleg from a live show recorded on another continent. You couldn’t Google the answer to a question over dinner. If after dinner you were still thinking about a fact you couldn’t conjure during the meal, you had to decide how much trouble it was worth to you. Your options were as follows:
- Ask enough people about it until you found someone who knew the answer.
- Wait for the answer to come to you during the course of living your life.
- Go to the library (where the answer would invariably be found on microfiche).
In my late teens, I spent ten days trying to come up with the name of the actor who played Tattoo on Fantasy Island. I did ridiculous impressions, “De plaaaane! De plaaane!” for everyone who crossed my path, trying to jostle the name from their stingy gray matter, but no one knew it (and pre-IMDb, no one cared). I could feel the name traveling from the back of my brain to the front, then to the tip of my tongue, where it stayed for over a week. At that point, I stopped asking; I wanted to see if, through sheer force of effort, I could remember it on my own. I wanted to see if by devoting enough time and synapses to the task, I would be rewarded with the answer.
On the night of the ninth day, while I was sleeping, my subconscious proffered the information to my conscious mind, where it was waiting for me when I woke up the next morning, as if it had been there all along:
Hervé Villechaize.
For as long as I live, I will never forget Hervé Villechaize’s name because of the neural calisthenics I had to perform in order to retrieve it from the recesses of my brain. I have not, in the last twenty years, had to wait that long for any piece of information. This is sad, because waiting is important.
There isn’t any music that can be purchased on iTunes or streamed through Spotify that has the same tangible quality as a cassette you selected from Columbia House and waited for two weeks for it to arrive at your door. Or the album that you had to save all of your babysitting or lawn-mowing money in order to buy and had to wait for one of your parents to drive you to the record store so that you could search through the alphabetized dividers—Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, J. Geils Band, Joan Jett—the click, click, click of the plastic cassettes or the fop, fop, fop of the cardboard-sleeved vinyl falling onto themselves while you located the album you were looking for. All of those actions—the saving, the driving, the clicking, the fopping—made the music, which you then had to wait until you got home to listen to, even more treasured, more important, more material, more tangled in your neural networks than if you had found it on your iPhone the instant you thought you might like to listen to it and then streamed it through your headphones and into your ears within seconds.
The albums we have now, like the books and the movies we have now, never get the chance to become objects because we deprive them of our waiting.
• •
In eighth grade, I had the type of crush on Mark Anderson that compelled me to memorize his class schedule so that I could walk past him in the hall and breathe his air between bells, hoping that some vaporous molecule that had been inside of him would come to live inside of me. He was the most popular boy in my grade, and I remained safe, shall we say, on the opposite end of the social spectrum.
In the spring of that year, the school organized a “lock-in” at the local YMCA—a grade-wide chaperoned sleepover. Mark spent the evening playing basketball with his friends. I spent the evening sitting on the far side of the court with a disposable camera hidden in my shirt. I waited for moments to snap photos of him when he wasn’t looking in my direction but was framed in such a way that I would later be able to revel in his astonishing beauty.
I couldn’t sleep that night for wondering what awaited me inside that disposable cardboard camera, which wouldn’t be developed until the next day when my mom would bring me to the one-hour photo booth, where my yearning for some evidence of him that I could keep under my pillow would make that hour seem like an eternity, like the longest hour in recorded history, because waiting can make even time, the most elusive and impermanent of things, more tangible.
If I’d had a digital camera with me that night at the Y instead of a film camera, I would not have had to withstand the heartbreaking disappointment of discovering that not a single one of the twenty-four exposures had come out. I also would not have felt the intensified longing for Mark that my failed attempt to capture an image of him had stirred in me. If I had been able to see the pictures on a tiny screen as I was taking them and to adjust accordingly to get the right light and the right shot, the images would’ve joined the realm of the instantaneous and the obtainable and so, too, would he have been erased from the clamorous realm of longing. If he had been so erased, I wouldn’t have become feverish a year later when I learned that he had played basketball with the younger brother of my dance team captain and had left his jean jacket at their house. And if I hadn’t had to wait until the next day to go to their house for dance practice, I wouldn’t have had time to imagine myself casually wearing his jean jacket as if he had given it to me, and might not have sneaked off to their basement the next afternoon during a ten- minute break to finger the perfectly frayed cuff while it was on my body, reliving my fantasy from the day before, and then rolled his jacket into a tight ball so that I could breathe in every molecule of him that never made it to me from across the hall. And if I hadn’t had to return the jacket to where I found it, and my desire for him hadn’t again been stoked by his absence, I would not have continued to pursue with a singular obsession the patently unrealistic mission of trying to possess him, which would never have ended six months later with Mark Anderson and me taking each other’s virginity.
I can say with absolute certainty that if I had gotten a perfectly filtered Instagramable image of him at the Y, if I had been able to capture enough of him to quench my desire for him at the exact moment that it wanted to be quenched, none of the rest would have happened. It was the waiting that made him manifest. It was the one-hour developing, the disappointment, the rolling in a ball of his jacket and having to give it back, the pining, the coveting, that allowed for having him at long last.
These days, near as I can tell, everyone wants to skip over the longing right to the having. And by all superficial measures, we can. We can swipe right anytime, we can watch porn on our phones in the bathroom at work, we can order anything our hearts desire from Amazon at 1:43 in the morning, we can stream any show or movie in accordance with our whim (in fact, with digital piracy, torrents, and leaks, we don’t even have to wait for something to be released in order to consume it). We have traded the tangibility of objects for the immediacy of information, and it has left us with a collective longing for something to hold. Heartbreakingly, we are trying to satisfy our longing for objects, for those things made precious by our waiting, by never having to wait for anything ever again. And it is exactly in getting everything we want at the moment we want it that creates the bottomless unfillable hole that drives us to want more things.
The French composer Achille-Claude Debussy famously claimed that music is not the notes, but the silence between them. If this is true, then a presence is equally defined by its absence, by the negative space around it, and an object or experience can be fully measured only by folding in the time we spend in anticipation of it and in remembrance of it.
My mom has never liked surprises, a personality trait I had long equated with a deficient sense of adventure and spontaneity. When I asked her about it recently, she mentioned that the reason she doesn’t like surprises is because they deny her the days and weeks of looking forward to an event that would otherwise last a mere few hours. The joy of anticipation draws out the experience into something she can savor far in advance of its happening, giving it more presence in her life as it stretches across the plain of time.
Last month, I streamed the first two episodes of a new TV series back-to-back, mainlining my entertainment as so many of us are wont to do these days. At the end of the second episode, instead of its rolling over to the opening sequence of the third, the website informed me that subsequent episodes would be released weekly. I succumbed to my own impatience, shouting in desperation at the screen—BUT I WANT IT NOW!—the flames of my entitlement stoked by the fuel of an instantaneous culture.
We want everything now. We want to listen to that song now and read that book on our e-reader now and have our hunger for food or sex be satisfied now and watch the next episode of whatever is making us feel good now so that we can watch the next one after that and the next one after that and the next one after that.
In being forced to wait a week for each new episode of this TV show, its presence in my life has grown far beyond what it would have had I watched the whole season in one or two evenings. I spend moments every day counting down the days until the next episode drops. I imagine the well-choreographed routine my best friend and I will carry out when he comes over to watch it: drawing the blinds against the late-day sun, pulling down the projection screen—like the one my third grade teacher used for filmstrips—in my comically tiny living room, setting up our cheap projector and speakers, curling up on the couch together to be entranced for an hour by light and sound and story. Throughout the week, I visit with the characters in my mind, wondering where they are and what they’re doing, unpacking details from the previous week’s episode. None of this happens when I fall in love with a show and watch it the way a competitive eater consumes hotdogs: all at once, without stopping to savor it. Even if the show is brilliant, the best-case scenario is that it leaves a similar impression as an interesting person I met at a party: enthralling me in the moment only to fade quickly from memory.
Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that waiting and inconvenience were bad and to be avoided at all cost. But in removing time, effort, space, and longing from our most precious things, we have stripped them of their preciousness. Everything has entered the realm of the instantaneous and the obtainable, so everything has run together, as if we were playing all the notes of Beethoven’s 9th without any rests. All of the sounds are there, but the delight and the substance are gone.
We need rests. We need to leave our fields fallow between harvests. Periods of loneliness make finding a partner more meaningful. Time spent in anticipation of a new show or an album release allow for greater appreciation of them when they arrive. Rests leave room for growth; they make space for awe. They allow what we have created, watched, heard, and experienced to be taken up by our hearts and our bodies. Waiting is a time of integration. If we allow ourselves to rest, to wait, if we change our relationship to inconvenience, we can recover the tangibility of objects and the materiality of time, giving us so much more to hold onto, to remember, to look forward to. Waiting is the only way to turn things back into themselves so that they can be touched, heard, read, watched, felt, loved, cherished.
