On Waiting

If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

Waiting is an enchantment. I have received orders not to move.

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

The time of boredom is empty, it has neither object nor end; its temporality is vague, but its vagueness and its immanence make it a poetic trope, a Laforguian ennui, a Proustian melancholy. Desire is object-related, mostly illusory, a Romantic trope par excellence, as fashionable today as consumption at the turn of the twentieth century. Situated between boredom and desire, waiting has the charms of neither. It is neither a melancholic condition given to propensities of philosophic depth, nor a Romantic illusion by which desire achieves its passionate failures. Waiting is not very interesting.¹

Although waiting is practised, endured, or suffered in many different ways and contexts, the apparent universal agreement that nobody likes to wait implies a contemporary attitude towards waiting that seems engendered not least by the failure of technology to deliver us from time. The psalmist, the lover in a courtship,² the man of action wait with hope, desire, or purpose, in sync with the requirements of history or the rhythms of nature. Their waiting is necessitated and legitimized by traditions and cultural norms different from the modern scenario of a formless, purposeless temporality experienced by the person who finds herself in the exemplary existential situation, having time without wanting it: the modern waiter whom we encounter in Proust, James, Eliot, or Woolf.

Even if not all experiences of waiting are the same, dependent as they are on history, context, and tradition, references to philosophical treatises on time by Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Poulet and illustrations with passages from James and T.S. Eliot might prove relevant for an investigation of a phenomenon so quotidian and familiar, and so repressed by economic and cultural necessities, that it has quite escaped our attention. The very familiarity of waiting has obscured it. Its uselessness has made it an economic liability. Its unpredictability has rendered waiting the precarious condition for unexpected self-encounters. Nobody likes to wait.

I propose that in the experience of waiting, because of the peculiar quality of consciousness it engenders, we enter into a temporality different from that time in which we daily strive to accomplish our tasks and meet our appointments. For Bergson real time is duration; we must endure time, we are the time that endures. Bergson's duration appears like the unconscious of official time within whose economic determinations we live – but do not have our being. In the experience of waiting, I suggest, we awaken to the repressed rhythms of duration and thus also to the deeper dimensions of our being. If in these dimensions we find ourselves estranged from the world in which we live, Gaston Bachelard and Georges Poulet add to that estrangement yet another one – an aesthetic estrangement.

Unlike for Bergson, for Bachelard time is conceivable only as the instant whose idealized, most complete expression is poetry, outside of which there is the nothingness of duration, a waste of time devoid of reality. Georges Poulet envisions the poem as a structuring of the instant into a form whose exclusivity, as in Bachelard, suggests that time in such form always reaches closure. But Bachelard's and Poulet's idealized conceptions of time – cultivated as they are in the aesthetic of the 'timelessness' of art – only deepen the waiter's sense of the tedium of her experience.

Even if the fluid, indeterminate qualities of Bergson's durée become staple characteristics of modernist literature – in nostalgia, melancholy, ennui, or resignation – waiting has remained unaesthetic, uninteresting. 'L'attente est horrible,' says Clytemnestra in Jean Giraudoux's Électre (92).

Waiting in Time

In his Principia, Isaac Newton distinguishes between 'absolute, true, and mathematical time' which 'flows equably without relation to anything external' and 'relative, apparent, and common time ... which is...