Thammasat University students interested in sociology, ethnology, anthropology, public policy, philosophy, social theory, ecology, literature, and related subjects should find an Open Access book available for free download at this link useful:
Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty was edited by Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak.
The TU Library collection includes other books analyzing different aspects of waiting.
Waiting is a widely shared international experience, whether in traffic and at passport or visa offices or more generally for rain to stop or new governments to be elected. If we spend too much time waiting we can feel bored, anxious, and uncertainty. This book explores the social phenomenon of waiting as a central part of human society. The question of when things are worth waiting for is an essential aspect of how people think of their lives. Ethnographies from Japan, Georgia, England, Ghana, Norway, Russia and the United States are included.
The results are that in different parts of the world, people experience time and engage in waiting differently. Economic crises and expatriation force some unfortunate people to wait for long times. Sometimes creative ways to wait are invented, as individuals sometimes feel they are waiting for a purpose and at others, that they are making no progress and waiting is pointless. Waiting can bring out in people such virtues as stoicism, persistence, perseverance and patience, but also weaknesses such as boredom, listlessness, and inertia. It is easy for people who are waiting to shift from positive to negative feelings as time goes on. Waiting is an aspect of modern life associated with suffering.
The editors suggest:
Waiting is a ubiquitous and familiar phenomenon. It could even be said that waiting is an integral part of human life. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of waiting is just beginning to be taken up as a theme of ethnographic enquiry in its own right in recent social and cultural anthropological work. It is noteworthy that we have had to wait all these years for an active, focused engagement with such a pervasive phenomenon.
Here are some thoughts about waiting by authors, many of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
It is very strange that the years teach us patience – that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
- Elizabeth Taylor, A Wreath of Roses
I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
- V. Lucas
Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.
- Gregory Corso
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, “age-old pastime of humanity”.
- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.
- Charles Bukowski, Women
If the one I waited for
came now, what should I do?
This morning’s garden filled with snow
is far too lovely
for footsteps to mar.
- Izumi Shikibu , The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
Waiting is an anticipated expiation. Every pleasure is surrounded by a waiting area which expresses the fact that millions of people desire the same thing at the same time. Waiting is the neutralization of the respective desires which bear upon the same object. Even perhaps upon suffering and death. If death were a public service, there would be waiting lists. Impatience finds its justification as a refusal of this void, this abeyance of time which has no justification in any other world and which is produced by the overcrowding, the overpopulation of all desires.
- Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
I hate waiting even five minutes for anybody. It always makes me rather cross. I am not punctual myself, I know, but I do like punctuality in others.
- Oscar Wilde
Because something in him know she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.
- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen but as the years wasted on nothing ever did, unless I caused it.
- Charles Bukowski
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.”
- Galway Kinnell, Mortal Acts Mortal Words
If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll wait forever.
- Will Rogers
Finally – we know this – life’s little wisdom is to wait (but to wait in the proper, pure state of mind), and the great grace that is bestowed on us in return is to survive. (Letters on Life)
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
- Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)