On Impatience

Convincing the angel

These past weeks, my mood has been one of extreme impatience.¹

Half-way through every conversation, I want it to end, even though only moments before, I had been looking forward to talking to someone. I can’t tell you how many introductions and prefaces to books I have read, only to reshelve the books and pace around a little longer.

I have always loved beginnings. Is this a kind of impatience?

Rilke: “If the Angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced her, not by your tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner.”

I have to admit to myself that I don’t really know what impatience is; when I feel impatient, I don’t actually feel impatient. Or, maybe a better way to put it: Impatience is a deceptive mood. It expresses itself by way of other, more readily identifiable feelings—and those are the feelings you become aware of when your impatience is ascendant.

My impatience wears my other feelings like cheap masks.

I just had a dream: I lived in a very small house. None of the windows or doors closed—everything was open—and when it rained, it came through the roof of the top floor and down through the floorboards onto the first floor. So, even on the first floor, I couldn’t get entirely out of the rain, unless I sat under some furniture or in one special spot under a crossbeam, but even then I got hit with a faint spray of rain. The rain did not pour or leak or drip through. It came down as it might in an arbor, outside. It was thinned out, half-pleasant, half-annoying. Here is how impatient I have been lately: it was a relief to find myself rooted to one otherwise uncomfortable spot, into which the shoddy porousness of the house forced me. I sat there and read once I saw the pages of my book wouldn’t get wet.

When it rained outside, it also rained inside. This is interesting. What does it have to do with impatience?

The image of patience might have begun with a heavy rain outside. I would have stood at the window of my little house, and that window would have had glass in it, it would have been dry on the inside and running with cool brightness on the outside. Nothing would come through the roof of the house save for a slight chill, and this would be dispelled easily by the fireplace, by dressing warmly—by patiently enjoying the cold dark rain. The front door would be firmly closed into its threshold. What I would not be able to do—or so I feel now—biding my time, in this storm-wrapped house.

But that is not how it was. The rain outside was only slightly worse than the rain inside. My patience contracted down almost to a point, where it certainly flipped into its compliment, impatience.

Excitement, boredom, annoyance, forgetfulness, aimless sentimentality (feeling sad that a piece of blank paper got wet when I dropped it in the snow). Looking ever ahead, holding out for the future no matter if that future is in ten minutes or ten days—it never comes, because just as it crosses over into your presence, you have already become somehow irritated with it or yourself—but really with everything. You do not even push it away. You push past it and your eyes remain locked on the horizon. The horizon is almost always beautiful. Nobody can ever arrive there—its very essence is setting out (which maybe isn’t so bad). The horizon is kept in its non-place by a kind of impatience.

If the panoramic horizon is the perspective of impatience, then maybe one- or two-point perspective—anything to force one toward a vanishing point, however virtual—is that of patience. Even this is likely wrong, I’m sorry to say. The trick is to get out of the patience–impatience continuum. Don’t patience and impatience switch positions like the Necker cube? If you go down a street far enough, you eventually come out again into the suffocating diffuseness of the horizon.

Part of the difficulty with impatience is that, like the above image, there is no clue to its orientation. It turns every moment into a false configuration where you are never quite sure what you are looking at, never quite sure what mood it really is that inhabits you at this moment. It makes you long for the feeling of a true beginning, an acute perspective, for some meaningful sense of separation between, as it were, the weather outside and the weather inside.

1. To honor the theme, I’m sending this out the moment I finish writing it instead of on my usual Tuesday or Thursday morning. Those are patient days—today is Sunday, the impatient day par excellence.