Anticipation

I was really drawn to a particular quote in Lerner’s “The Dark Threw Patches Upon Me Also”. In this particular quote, Lerner describes our obsession with keeping track of time:

We often say twilight but mean dusk,
or check our watches without noting the time,
two of the minor practices that make us
enough of a people to believe that a raid
on the compound can bring closure. 

It seems to me that here he is commenting on the anticipation that is ever-present in our society: we skip over dusk and head straight to twilight; we check our watches almost subconsciously and incessantly in order to know if time has passed until the proper moment. It’s almost as if we anticipate these moments, waiting for them to happen, and in the process we ignore the liminal space in between. We ignore the minutes between 4:30 at work and 5:00 when we get off; we disregard dusk as a part of the day, looking at it only as night and day. It’s interesting that he chooses to use compound in order to describe what I’m assuming is time. A compound can be made of several different parts; it is not simply binary night and day, black and white, etc. Thus time is not simply a start and an end, but also encompassed of all the moments in between. He suggests that by “raiding”, or taking these liminal spaces away from beginning and end allows us a sort of closure. It’s as if people have anxiety about using/ recognizing the time they have in between the start and the end; the common road trip phrase “are we there yet?” comes to mind here. We work so hard towards goals and the completion of tasks that we don’t take the time to appreciate or recognize the moments in between starting and completing these tasks. Lerner puts into so many words that people have an obsession with time that is viewed through a narrow binary scope. Instead of living in the moment, we are anticipating the next one.