It occurs to me that I haven’t really mentioned my research here in the body of my text. I don’t want to burden the prospective listener with subjects too esoteric, but on the other hand, it seems that my not mentioning my research belies some form of embarrassment? And given that I woke up today regretting yesterday’s confessions (see pages 147–8, re: Delaware Bay) and am now practically impaired with bitterness that a) I felt such tender things about you, Laura, in the first place and b) I then immortalized them by writing them down, I think now would be a good time to change the subject. Let’s not forget that my audience here is diverse. I’ve got a legal obligation to humanize myself. For my own defense. Other people might want to know, how did I contribute to society? What did I care about?
I care about pauses. Actually, I collect pauses. Back in the year 1990, fresh out of Mune, after studying many of the most significant moments in human history, I thought it might be cool to collect all those moments—literary, cultural, political—when something was not said or not done. Hesitations, standstills, lulls, ellipses. All kinds of inactivity. I called it “Pausology: An Experimental Encyclopedia.” The work stemmed from my longtime interest in the concept of “eventlessness” (which I would define as moments in history when nothing was happening, producing a significant insignificance).
At first I thought I was doing something groundbreaking. I was writing antihistory. History’s negative. Then I realized the obvious, that the material I was trying to collect was totally undocumented. One summer I hired a research assistant through my old prof at Mune, and we spent most of the summer just trying to figure out how to begin. After Meadow was born, I had to adjust my ambitions and reckon with the fact that there was no way that my encyclopedia would ever be “complete.” And after a while, looking over the bits and pieces of promising chapterlets and indexes, I thought, well it could make for an interesting coffee table book. I don’t know. People kept asking me, “How’s the book? Making progress on that book?” The truth is, I had told too many people about it to stop.11
For all of his brilliant writing, playwright and unofficial pausologist Harold Pinter loved moments in which the characters did not speak, leaving us now with plays chock-full of excruciating or “pregnant” pauses. Although Pinter later came to repudiate his famous pauses, he happily wrote 140 of them into Betrayal and 224 into The Homecoming, which, if faithfully acted, led to some satirically long, theater-clearing performances that will fuel bad undergraduate repertoires for generations to come. I’d like to draw a connection here between dramatic pauses and marital pauses. Both dramatic and marital pauses vary in duration; the shortest, or most minor, are easily ignorable (“…”) but do signal some form of inner struggle; other beats are longer and more loaded with effortful suppression or confusion (pause), but the longest pauses (silence) are the ones no one should have to bear, and speaking personally I would have rather been flayed alive than to stand there with my wife having nothing to say, as in nothing left to say.
Therefore, anyone interested in Pinterian pauses could save the cost of the ticket and spend an evening witnessing someone’s disintegrating marriage. Here’s an excerpt from mine:
WOMAN
Looking up from her schoolwork
Oh. I didn’t know you were here.
MAN
Yes. I’m… here.
WOMAN
Well… you might as well sit.
MAN
Where?
WOMAN
Anywhere.
MAN
Next to you?
Silence
Is she asleep?
MAN
Who?
WOMAN
Our little girl.
MAN
Oh, yes. She was very tired. But happy.
WOMAN
Happy… Happy…
Silence
MAN
And you?
WOMAN
Startled
Me?
MAN
Are you…?
WOMAN
I don’t know.
Pause
I don’t know.
MAN
Might we…
WOMAN
Oh. I don’t know anymore.
MAN
Do you…
WOMAN
No.
Pause
Silence
Pause
MAN
Well. Would you like a ham sandwich? I’m going into the kitchen. I could…
WOMAN
Yes. All right. Thank you. A ham sandwich would be nice.
MAN
All right.
He stands
WOMAN
Wait.
MAN
What is it?
WOMAN
I don’t really want a ham sandwich. I’m not hungry.
MAN
Well. Would you like another kind of sandwich? Egg salad? Roast beef? What about an ice cream sandwich?
WOMAN
Like I said. I’m not hungry.
MAN
What about a pretzel? A fruitcake? Lamb with mint jelly? WHY IS EVERYTHING I OFFER YOU INSUFFICIENT?
Silence
END OF PLAY
But that’s not very funny.12
Well, Harold Pinter wasn’t a very funny playwright either.
I’ve always been fascinated by—and uncomfortable with—pauses. My research forced me to see that short pockets of silence were everywhere and that even sound needs silence in order to be sound. There are tiny silences all over this page. Between paragraphs. Between these very words. Still, they can be lonesome. So for all my project’s shortcomings, I’d say the worst is that I haven’t shaken the lonesome feeling that pauses give me. Sometimes I still wish there weren’t any silences at all. And so it is with some reluctance that I give you this one.