Art & Waiting
Last weekend, a friend & I caught a performance of Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it very much.
Despite it's existentialist underpinnings, with a length of over 2 hours, I found it tedious. Nonetheless, it is quite remarkable - After all, how many plays do you know which explicitly deal with the boring topic of waiting, eh?
When you stop to ponder about it, I don't think any of us likes to wait. Despite the cliche of ``stopping to smell the roses,'' most of us see waiting (in queues, for appointments, etc.) as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. After the play, I felt like conducting a small investigation - Had anybody analyzed waiting from a philosophical standpoint? :-)
As expected, you don't find much written about the act of waiting in the Philosophical literature - Cuz let's face it, it's simply not as glamourous a topic as say love, death etc., right? After a bit of searching, I did however, manage to find material by an interesting fellow named, Harold Schwizer. Schwizer likes to analyze waiting from a phenomenological perspective. I encourage you to read his stuff - some of his ideas are pretty cool. The thing that I found most interesting in his work was the idea that waiting is an essential aspect of appreciating Art.
I won't go into the nitty-gritties of his analysis - some of it is rather complex to put in a single journal entry. Rather, I thought I would just throw this idea which I found especially sweet & charming:
The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in ``The Relevance of the Beautiful'':
. . . we must learn how to dwell upon the work in a specific
way. When we dwell upon the work, there is no tedium
involved, for the longer we allow ourselves, the more it
displays its manifold riches to us. The essence of our
temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry in this
way. And perhaps it is the only way that is granted to us finite
beings to relate to what we call eternity.
In other words, The less we wait impatiently, the more we tarry leisurely. The more we tarry, Gadamer suggests, the more the work of art reveals, because in tarrying we wait without object or purpose. In tarrying, we are receptive to let a work of art display its manifold riches to us. If we learn how to tarry in the finite temporality of the work of art, we intuit the infinite of which the work of art is a part. “The essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry in this way,” to repeat Gadamer’s phrase.
Thoughts?
Despite it's existentialist underpinnings, with a length of over 2 hours, I found it tedious. Nonetheless, it is quite remarkable - After all, how many plays do you know which explicitly deal with the boring topic of waiting, eh?
When you stop to ponder about it, I don't think any of us likes to wait. Despite the cliche of ``stopping to smell the roses,'' most of us see waiting (in queues, for appointments, etc.) as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. After the play, I felt like conducting a small investigation - Had anybody analyzed waiting from a philosophical standpoint? :-)
As expected, you don't find much written about the act of waiting in the Philosophical literature - Cuz let's face it, it's simply not as glamourous a topic as say love, death etc., right? After a bit of searching, I did however, manage to find material by an interesting fellow named, Harold Schwizer. Schwizer likes to analyze waiting from a phenomenological perspective. I encourage you to read his stuff - some of his ideas are pretty cool. The thing that I found most interesting in his work was the idea that waiting is an essential aspect of appreciating Art.
I won't go into the nitty-gritties of his analysis - some of it is rather complex to put in a single journal entry. Rather, I thought I would just throw this idea which I found especially sweet & charming:
The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in ``The Relevance of the Beautiful'':
. . . we must learn how to dwell upon the work in a specific
way. When we dwell upon the work, there is no tedium
involved, for the longer we allow ourselves, the more it
displays its manifold riches to us. The essence of our
temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry in this
way. And perhaps it is the only way that is granted to us finite
beings to relate to what we call eternity.
In other words, The less we wait impatiently, the more we tarry leisurely. The more we tarry, Gadamer suggests, the more the work of art reveals, because in tarrying we wait without object or purpose. In tarrying, we are receptive to let a work of art display its manifold riches to us. If we learn how to tarry in the finite temporality of the work of art, we intuit the infinite of which the work of art is a part. “The essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry in this way,” to repeat Gadamer’s phrase.
Thoughts?