Time of waiting, rhythm, desire

We are in the period of Advent, the time when Christians look forward to the celebration of the Christmas of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a time of waiting not only for believers, but for almost everyone in the Western world. Those who are not believers look forward with joy or annoyance to the winter holidays, festivals, traditional sweets, colorful Christmas trees and lights, gifts, bagpipers, Christmas carols, the nativity scene, Jingle Bells, and Dean Martin singing.

Advent is a season of anticipation. Its origins are ancient because, as we know, Christian Christmas Day was chosen to coincide with a holiday with very ancient roots: the celebration of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year when the days begin to lengthen again. People look forward to the winter solstice because its arrival puts an end to the slow but seemingly inexorable advance of night: its annual repetition proclaims that light is not defeated by darkness, that the warmth of life prevails over the frost of death.

So far I have used all the verbs in the present tense; I should have used them in the past tense. In fact, the Advent experience is less and less a part of our world. It belongs very little even to Christians, the majority of whom no longer perceive it as a time of penance, waiting and fasting (physical and spiritual). For everyone else, it is even worse: as early as mid-November in our latitudes (much earlier in the United States), an orgy of Christmas shopping begins; the streets and shops are illuminated; sweets of all kinds overflow from the shelves of supermarkets and cafeterias.

Advent is only the most illustrious victim of a catastrophe that passes almost unnoticed: the extinction of the time of waiting. What our society no longer tolerates is the idea of having to wait for the satisfaction of any desire or need. The postponement of wants is not tolerated: you eat when you are hungry, you sleep when you are tired, you get a tan in the winter and go skiing in the summer. The times of expectation have all disappeared: not only Advent, but also engagements, canonical times for vacations, anniversaries and feast days.

Life is less and less marked by eagerly awaited moments (happiness or anxiety), and even small daily events (waking times in the morning, sleeping times in the evening, meal times) have become completely random. Smartphones have delivered the coup de grace to even the most mundane waiting. There is so little waiting that time is immediately occupied by looking at a cell phone. Smartphones allow the majority to live in a state of perpetual hypnotic trance, in which the empty space between one fact and the next is no longer perceived.

One might think that waiting has been sacrificed to the needs of gratification: after centuries of asceticism, desire, free of hypocritical delay, would finally assert its right to immediate enjoyment. Why wait when pleasure is already here and now, and only needs to be seized? If this were so, our age would be the true golden age, the happiest period in human history. But it is not.

The pleasure that the market offers us every day never manages to be fully consumed, to reach full enjoyment, to reach the moment of saying "enough!" Instead, its effects, like those of a drug, fade quickly, requiring with each administration a new dose even greater than the previous one. Everywhere there is a deep and widespread dissatisfaction, the roots of which we do not see, but which undermines the existence of many. Even the denatality that afflicts the West is a sign of a collective loss of zest for life: people stop giving life to others when they doubt whether it is worth living. The suppression of waiting has not liberated desire, but kills it.

To better understand what waiting is, we must now talk about what time is. St. Thomas argued that there are two different measures of duration: the first would be eternity, which measures a synchronous duration, an infinite instant without dimensions; the second would be human time, which flows and is composed of "before" and "after". In other words, "before" and "after" are the measure of the kind of duration called "time. But are "before" and "after" enough to explain time? They are not, because they need a pause to separate them. This pause between "before" and "after" we call "present. The present exists and does not exist. It does not exist because it is constantly changing, flowing from "before" to "after" without ever being grasped. It exists, however, because if it were not there, one could no longer distinguish the before from the after, and time would truly be ?????? ???? ??????????.

Starting from St. Thomas' concept of time, a great French musician of the last century, Olivier Messiaen, developed a theory of rhythm as the essence of life and the entire universe. The measure of duration that we call "time", according to Messiaen, is characterized by a pause, the waiting, that separates the "before" and the "after", creating a rhythm: "before-wait-after". This primordial rhythm is life in its continuous flow, the music of creation out of which everything arises and flows. Waiting is not a true suspension of time, for even in waiting there is a before and an after, but it is the closest thing to suspended time that human beings can imagine.

The suspended time of waiting is immediately populated in our minds by thoughts and fantasies, desires and fears, about the "before" that has just passed and the "after" that is to come. When we hope for something that we consider beautiful and good, the expectation is called desire, thrill, excitement, enthusiasm. If we wish for something that seems bad and dangerous not to happen, waiting becomes fear, dread, anxiety, even terror (this is why, by the way, one should always examine the underlying wishes before an unfounded fear, anxiety, or distress). Then there is a situation in which waiting seems empty because all desire seems unattractive: this is called boredom and is often the first step toward depression. Psychological time thus moves in all directions, sustained by its own internal rhythm (before-waiting-after), which is the rhythm of desire and life, which therefore coincide. This is the teaching I received from the person with whom I learned to be a psychoanalyst many years ago, who, not surprisingly, was also a musician.

Why does the contemporary world try so hard to suppress the time of waiting? Because waiting is essential in order to satisfy desires and to experience full happiness; desire and happiness are the main enemies of the modern economy, they are the threat that hangs over the economic dynamism of the modern world. Only in appearance is the so-called consumer society based on the satisfaction of desires; on the contrary, it is a civilization based on permanent dissatisfaction, because it must always keep alive the need to consume. To destroy expectation is to take the power and effectiveness out of pleasure and desire. Without the rhythm created by expectation, desire and pleasure disappear, just as music without pauses between notes disappears, becoming like "a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, which means nothing.

Pope John Paul II and then-Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of contemporary civilization as permeated by a culture of death. Our world is indeed increasingly a world of death, not only because it is riddled with countless wars (that would be nothing new), and not even because technological and scientific progress often becomes an instrument of death rather than of life, but also because it is a society that, in order to feed a drugged economy, has to abolish expectations by creating only shadows of desires, larvae kept artificially alive, fetishes that are seemingly powerful but empty. But no human being can tolerate the absence of desire, or its replacement by grotesque parodies, because desire is the very rhythm of life. Having lost this rhythm, one is lost in time, one has the impression of plunging into an opaque eternity. The deception is revealed by the fact that today we live among dead bodies -- obscenely displayed at all times by all media, in the form of information or entertainment -- but are strictly protected from any contact with those who are approaching death: confined in separate institutions, hospitals, nursing homes, so as not to remind us of the material of which our ragged little eternity is made.

Thus begins a desperate race for any desire, precisely because the constant satisfaction of any desire intoxicates us, prevents us from thinking, ultimately makes us stupid. But it is a dangerous game, as Teresa of Avila well knew and Truman Capote repeated: "More tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones. There is only one desire that could restore time, rhythm, meaning to life: we all know what it is, but we are so afraid of it that we pretend to ignore it.

But Advent, which returns every year with the winter solstice, reminds us that it is the light that will have the last word.

Merry Christmas to you all!