Waiting is a kind of suspended animation. Time solidifies: a dead weight. The mind reddens a little with anger and then blanks off into a sort of abstraction and fitfully wanders, but presently it comes up red and writhing again, straining to get loose. Waiting casts one's life into a little dungeon of time. It is a way of being controlled, of being rendered immobile and helpless. One can read a book or sing (odd looks from the others) or chat with strangers if the wait is long enough to begin forming a bond of shared experience, as at a snowed-in airport. But people tend to do their waiting stolidly. When the sound system went dead during the campaign debate in 1976, Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter stood in mute suspension for 27 minutes, looking lost.
To enforce a wait, of course, is to exert power. To wait is to be powerless. Consider one minor, almost subliminal form. The telephone rings. One picks up the receiver and hears a secretary say, "Please hold for Mr. Godot." One sits for perhaps five seconds, the blood pressure just beginning to cook up toward the red line, when Godot comes on the line with a hearty "How are ya?" and business proceeds and the moment passes, Mr. Godot having established that he is (subtly) in control, that his time is more precious than his callee's. (Incidentally, the only effective response to hearing the secretary's "Please hold for..." is to hang up without explanation. After two or three times, Mr. Godot himself will place the call, as he should have done at the start.) But the "please hold" ploy is a mere flicker in the annals of great and horrible waiting. Citizens of the Soviet Union would think it bourgeois decadence to complain about such a trifle. The Soviets have turned waiting into a way of life. The numb wait is their negotiating style: a heavy, frozen, wordless impassivity designed to madden and exhaust the people across the table. To exist in the Soviet Union is to wait. Almost perversely, when Soviet shoppers see a line forming, they simply join it, assuming that some scarce item is about to be offered for sale. A study published by Pravda calculates that Soviet citizens waste 37 billion hours a year standing in line to buy food and other basic necessities. To bind an entire people to that kind of life is to do a little of the work of the Gulag in a different style.
Waiting is a form of imprisonment. One is doing time—but why? One is being punished not for an offense of one's own but often for the inefficiencies of those who impose the wait. Hence the peculiar rage that waits engender, the sense of injustice. Aside from boredom and physical discomfort, the subtler misery of waiting is the knowledge that one's most precious resource, time, a fraction of one's life, is being stolen away, irrecoverably lost.
Americans have ample miseries of waiting, of course—waits sometimes connected with affluence and leisure. The lines to get a passport in Manhattan last week stretched around the block in Rockefeller Center. Travelers waited four and five hours just to get into bureaucracy's front door. A Washington Post editorial writer reported a few days ago that the passengers on her 747, diverted to Hartford, Conn., on the return flight from Rome as a result of bad weather in New York City, were forced to sit on a runway for seven hours because no customs inspectors were on hand to process them.
The great American waits are often democratic enough, like traffic jams. Some of the great waits have been collective, tribal—waiting for the release of the American hostages in Iran, for example. But waiting often makes class distinctions. One of the more depressing things about being poor in America is the endless waiting it entails: waiting for medical care at clinics or in emergency rooms, waiting in welfare or unemployment lines.
The waiting rooms of the poor are forlorn, but in fact almost all waiting rooms are spiritless and blank-eyed places where it always feels like 3 in the morning.
One of the inestimable advantages of wealth is the immunity that it can purchase from serious waiting. The rich do not wait in long lines to buy groceries or airplane tickets. The help sees to it. The limousine takes the privileged right out onto the tarmac, their shoes barely grazing the ground.
People wait when they have no choice or when they believe that the wait is justified by the reward—a concert ticket, say. Waiting has its social orderings, its rules and assumptions. Otherwise peaceful citizens explode when someone cuts into a line that has been waiting a long time. It is unjust; suffering is not being fairly distributed. Oddly, behavioral scientists have found that the strongest protests tend to come from the immediate victims, the people directly behind the line jumpers. People farther down the line complain less or not at all, even though they have been equally penalized by losing a place.
Waiting is difficult for children. They have not yet developed an experienced relationship with time and its durations: "Are we there yet, Daddy?" There can be pleasant, tingling waits, of course, full of fantasies, and they are often connected with children: the wait for the child to arrive in the first place, the wait for Christmas, for summer vacation. Children wait more intensely than adults do. Sheer anticipation makes their blood jump in a lovely way.
Waiting can have a delicious quality ("I can't wait to see her." "I can't wait for the party"), and sometimes the waiting is better than the event awaited. At the other extreme, it can shade into terror: when one waits for a child who is late coming home or—most horribly—has vanished. When anyone has disappeared, in fact, or is missing in action, the ordinary stress of waiting is overlaid with an unbearable anguish of speculation: Alive or dead?
Waiting can seem an interval of nonbeing, the black space between events and the outcomes of desires. It makes time maddeningly elastic: it has a way of seeming to compact eternity into a few hours. Yet its brackets ultimately expand to the largest dimensions. One waits for California to drop into the sea or for "next year in Jerusalem" or for the Messiah or for the Apocalypse. All life is a waiting, and perhaps in that sense one should not be too eager for the wait to end. The region that lies on the other side of waiting is eternity.
It's like Lance Morrow can read exactly what I am feeling right now when he wrote this, especially when he said that "To enforce a wait, of course, is to exert power. To wait is to be powerless." And when I got to the part where he wrote "People wait...when they believe that the wait is justified by the reward", I can't help but wonder: will this waiting that I am going through again finally be justified this time?
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