After leaving university I worked as a teaching assistant at a large state school in South West London. Like many people after university, thrown out into the world burdened with debt and no clear idea what to do, I felt lost.

One morning in January 2011, in the staff room before lessons, I read through the transcript of a speech Obama had given the night before. Shoes skidded past in the hallway outside. The previous week there had been an attempt to assassinate U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a constituents’ meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords had been badly wounded and several others had been killed. Obama was leading the country in mourning.

He went through the names of the six who died—including Christina-Taylor Green, murdered before her tenth birthday—and those who tried to save others, like Patricia Maisch, the sixty-one-year-old woman who wrestled away the killer’s ammunition. “Heroism is here, all around us,” said Obama, “in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, just waiting to be summoned—as it was on Saturday morning.”¹¹³

The political scientist George Blaustein has written about the power (and pitfalls) of Obama’s oratory: “in the greatest Obama speeches, because of their eloquence and ceremonial grandeur, time itself slows. The moment is a sacred, baptismal pause…The speech announces the moment, and it is the moment.”¹¹⁴

It could have been because I was especially lost at the time—and surrounded by young children—but, reading that speech, I remember feeling held. Or, as Blaustein says, like time itself had slowed. And I don’t think it’s snide to say that the effect Obama generates in his best speeches—of momentous moment-ness—is movie-like. Not just in that they aspire to grandeur, but in that they actively draw their listeners into a variable timescape, one where the world might drop into slow motion—to draw out the full impact of a sentiment—or stop altogether.

In the movie Hardball, the character Keanu plays, Conor, gives a speech about a recently murdered student in which his phrases follow exactly the same elevated cadences as an Obama speech. Recounting the time he watched his student play baseball, Conor says: “I swear I was lifted in that moment to a better place. I swear he—he lifted the world in that moment. He made me a better person even if just for that moment.”

I was lifted; he lifted the world; he made me a better person…

The clauses almost seem to collapse in on themselves as Conor realizes it was “just for that moment.” So long as it lasts, though, it defies gravity. For that moment—as in the moment of an Obama speech—no one is rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, native or alien, Self or Other. All are held and lifted and weightless.