When I set out to do a personal study of Advent, I immediately performed a cursory Google search for "philosophy of waiting" hoping to find an essay or something to catalyze my thoughts on the topic. The search led me to Harold Schweizer's , a brilliant book from the series from Routledge. It was, in an almost eerie sense, the exact thing I was looking for. So I placed an order.
I am now slowly making my way through the book, and the plan is this: To post blog reflections on a chapter-by-chapter basis during the next couple of weeks.
On Waiting's back cover promises that Schweizer's work "examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon [of waiting] from diverse angles and in fascinating style," and chapter one -- "Nobody Likes to Wait" -- wastes no time in fulfilling this assertion. Schweizer sets the stage thusly:
Although waiting rooms, train stations, airports, or hotel lobbies are merely to be passed through, I shall argue... that waiting is not simply a passage of time to be traversed... In waiting, time is slow and thick. Waiting is more than merely an inconvenient delay. It is more than a matter of time. Waiting has its rewards, as I want to argue here... And yet, we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.1
As a result of the Enlightenment's lust for the quantifiable and absolute, somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century the concept of time became the primary organizing principle of society. It wasn't long before people discovered that this reductionist version of "time" was something that could be exploited -- time, we realized is money. But "what is lost," Schweizer says, "when time is money is the content of time itself, but it is a content that seems inconceivable without economic determinations or measurements by clocks."2 That is to say, time-is-money looks like time, but it doesn't feel like time.
Schweizer next uses the rise of the train system and the resulting necessary synchronization of time between stations and trains to make a great point: "Time is synchronized only for those who have pocket watches."3 Not knowing when a train leaves, or (even worse) knowing what time it leaves but not having the means to know what time it is now is a serious setback for those too poor to afford time-measuring devices. And lest we be content keeping this problem in the past, Schweizer reminds us that "waiting is still assigned to the poor and powerless so as to ritualistically reinforce social and political demarcations... The poor will always be with us; the poor will always wait. Their time is not money."4
...Blessed are ? Maybe so.
Schweizer then moves on to discussing the effects of the ubiquitous screen on waiting. Because I am never very far away from my laptop, and am almost always attached to my iPhone, the very act of waiting is nearly non-existent in my daily existence. It's going to be a few minutes? No problem. I'll just play a quick round of . No need for me to just sit here. For Schweizer, the acceleration of new technology continues to compress space, which in turn makes waiting feel like an unwarranted and alien expansion of space. For us, waiting is nothing more than sheer tediousness.
Which is why, for Schweizer, the very act of waiting is subversive:
"By the divine standards of time's exactitude, by the diviner economics of its consumption, by the light of speed, waiting must seem a temporary aberration, an anachronism, an embarassment. The person who waits is out of sync with time, outside of the 'moral' and economic community of those whose time is productive and synchronized or whose time need not -- in the habit of velocity -- be experienced at all. The waiter's enforced passivity expels him from the community of productive citizens; his endurance of time estranges him from the culture of money and speed."5
It is when we truly endure time that we wait, Schweizer argues. This form of waiting is never accompanied by the preposition "for" -- waiting "for" this, or waiting "for" that. And it is this type of waiting that situates us decidedly outside of the "community of productive citizens." When we wait, we send a message that says we are not held captive to a consumerist society, a society which .
It will be interesting to explore how Schweizer unpacks all of this in the coming chapters. I'm particularly keen to think through how his assertion that we can have "unexpected intuitions" when we practice waiting as enduring time and not waiting "for" ("objectless waiting," as he calls it) can still have transformative power during Advent when it seems like we most decidedly are waiting "for" -- for the coming of the Promised One.
Stay tuned.
