On Waiting

Harold Schweizer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135974206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

'This is a quite remarkable book, a pleasure to read. Not only is it clear and informative but also by turns witty, melancholic and insightful. The book is astonishingly erudite, but wears this learning so lightly and so charmingly that it is both easy and gripping to read.' Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

Penelope waits by her loom for Odysseus, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, all of us have to wait: for buses, phone calls and the kettle to boil. But do we know what the checking of one's watch and pacing back and forth is really all about? What is the relationship between waiting and time? Is there an ethics of waiting, or even an art of waiting? Do the internet, online shopping and text messaging mean that waiting has come to an end?

On Waiting explores such and similar questions in compelling fashion. Drawing on some fascinating examples, from the philosopher Henri Bergson's musings on a lump of sugar to Kate Croy waiting in Wings of the Dove to the writings of Rilke, Bishop, and Carver, On Waiting examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon from diverse angles in fascinating style. On Waiting is the first book to present a philosophy of waiting.

Philosophy/Literature

Notes

ONE NOBODY LIKES TO WAIT

1 St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 264 (11.14).

2 In his A Philosophy of Boredom (London: Reaktion, 2005), Lars Svendsen claims similarly that his subject is equally indefinable.

3 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76.

4 Jean Giraudoux, Électre (Paris: Grasset, 1987), 92 (my translation).

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1989), 47.

6 Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Vintage, 1996), 90, 190.

7 See Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom: “Boredom lacks the charm of melancholy ….” 19.

8 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 63.

9 Isaac Newton, The Principia, trans. Andrew Motte (New York: Promethius, 1995), 13.

10 D. Graham Burnett, “Mapping Time: Chronometry on Top of the World,” Daedalus (Spring 2003): 14.

11 Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 6.

12 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore, David Frisby, and Kaethe Mengelberg (London: Routledge, 2004), 444–445.

13 Hence Beardsworth’s observation that “… all experiences of time (including the ‘a-temporal’ temporalities of the unconscious) are to be situated within processes of technicisation …” and “… the profit-related interest of capital is nothing but the reduction of the future to a minimal difference with the present ….” Richard Beardsworth, “Practices of Procrastination,” Parallax 5, 1 (1999): 11, 12.

14 Richard C. Larson, “There’s More to a Line Than Its Wait,” Technology Review 91, 5 (July 1988): 60.

15 Winterson, Art Objects, 138, 139.

16 Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 83.

17 Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, trans. Michael Degener (London: Continuum, 2005), 120, 122.

18 Robert J. Samuelson, “The Sad Fate of the Comma,” Newsweek (July 23, 2007): 41.

19 The Paul Virilio Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 142.

20 Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 35.

21 Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon, 121.

22 Hartmut Rosa, “Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society,” Constellations 10, 1 (2003): 6–7, 9.

23 Ann Barr Snitow, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different,” in Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Mary Eagleton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 193.

24 Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 14.

25 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 27, 31.

26 Richard Gilman, “The Waiting Since,” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 68.

27 Marya Mannes, “Two Tramps,” in Casebook on Waiting for Godot, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 30.

28 Norman Mailer, “A Public Notice on Waiting for Godot,” in Casebook, ed. Cohn, 71.

29 Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Samuel Beckett or Presence on the Stage,” in Casebook, ed. Cohn, 18.

30 Robert Champigny, “Waiting for Godot: Myth, Words, Wait,” in Casebook, ed. Cohn, 143.

31 Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” trans. Michael J. Jones, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 331.

32 Beckett, Godot, 29.

33 Hugh Kenner, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. Bloom, 61, 62.

34 Ibid., 60.

35 Beckett, Godot, 69.

36 Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 329.

37 Beckett, Godot, 16.

38 Ibid., 31.

TWO A BRIEF THEORY OF WAITING

1 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 115.

2 Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Continuum, 2002), 207.

3 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Cosimo, 2005), 12–13.

4 Henri Bergson, Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 502.

5 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 216.

6 Bergson, Oeuvres, 502.

7 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007), 113.

8 Ibid., 125.

9 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 100–1.

10 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 205. Lyotard states similarly that “All genuine music … [a]spires to exemption from syntheses, forms, becomings, intentions and retentions … .” Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 163.

11 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 123.

12 Walter Benjamin, “The Story Teller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 91.

13 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 123.

14 T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 17.

15 Ibid., 173.

16 Ibid., 180.

17 Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 329.

18 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 129.

19 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 288.

20 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 14

21 Bergson...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• One Nobody Likes to Wait
• Two A Brief Theory of Waiting: Henri Bergson’s Lump of Sugar
• Three In the Waiting Room
• Four Penelope’s Insomnia
• Five Lingering, Tarrying, Dwelling Upon: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem”
• Six Waiting for Death: Ferdinand Hodler’s Paintings of Valentine Godé-Darel
• Seven Waiting and Hoping: Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”
• In Closing
• Notes
• Works Cited