Desire, Sadness, and the World
A close call reveals the weight of existence.
I’m not convinced that the world is weightless.
Last Friday in New York, I stepped out of an office building at 29th and Park St. and saw a young woman chasing a toddler along the sidewalk. I walked past them while searching for an address on my phone. Before I knew it, pure instinct possessed me and I swung around, putting my hand out to stop the toddler from running directly onto the street. The young woman, a couple seconds behind her son, grabbed him and took him back to the stroller, perhaps never to think about that moment again.
It’s strange —I’ve had the experience surge back to mind perhaps 50 times over the weekend. The routine glance at my phone, the visceral awareness of movement behind me, the pure reflex.
It felt like an encounter with bare contingency: if I’d been a half second slower; if the kid had been running a bit faster; if the young woman had slipped; if traffic had been moving a bit more quickly…
Perhaps what made the encounter on the New York street so haunting is that contingency and heaviness go together. When I think back on that moment, I can feel the frailty of the child so acutely. If the situation had been slightly different, the moment would not have been a forgettable incident, but the most tragic day in both of their lives. In coming within a millimeter of such tragedy, one immediately feels that this thing, here, has value, weight, and simply should not be lost, not this way.
Unhappiness seems to go together with a sense that existence is “light.” Unhappiness is a common theme at Wisdom of Crowds. Both Shadi and Damir have discussed their experiences of burnout. We’ve talked about the listlessness that so often seems to show up with success. It’s one of Christine’s primary interests, and it’s also close to the issue Oliver Traldi was pursuing in his recent essay. In Traldi’s narration, “The problem is with not wanting, or not knowing what one wants…[In] the world at least that most readers probably live in—wanting is not an impediment to a happy life in a situation of scarcity but a necessary skill for a happy life in a position of plenty.”
But as Traldi argues, wanting is not something obvious, nor is consumption (whether of products or relationships) so simple: “I couldn’t get a feel for what I wanted: I had to look at more and more options because nothing really stuck out in the way wanting tends to make things stick out.” Either one samples a smoothly-presented, market-provided option and finds it dissatisfying, or else one stays aloof, surveying options, not quite committing to any of them, remaining dissatisfied.
In a powerful essay this week, Lauren Oyler narrates her experience of anxiety: “I’ve never had the kind of panic attack that people mistake for a medical emergency, but sometimes I become very still, sort of unable to move, for, I don’t know, ten to twenty minutes to an hour, and my muscles are sore the next day. There are the usual racing thoughts: love, squandered potential, unlikely vanities, loss of income. Injustices committed against me; chores. Will I get cancer? Knowing that everyone worries they have cancer helps only a little bit. My ultimate anxiety is not that a certain fear will come true. Rather, I experience panic as mostly meta: the horror of being trapped, in this mind-set, for the rest of my life.”
Oyler’s is not the same experience Traldi is describing, but there are echoes. What both are experiencing is more than just annoyance (the original French sense of ennui). There’s a fundamental slippage, an experience of weightlessness twice over—the objects presented to oneself are not heavy enough, nor is one’s desire itself. Moreover, one’s desire and one’s reality don’t cohere: whatever is outside and whatever is inside just don’t align. Feel that disjointment enough times and you begin to doubt that anything has weight at all.
But here is where I think that Oyler’s and Traldi’s descriptions aren’t getting to the heart of the issue. It’s not really that the world is too light and insubstantial, but that it is too full and heavy. Or better: We have a hard time attuning ourselves to its weight. I think the reason that those two minutes on a New York street have kept reverberating in my memory the last few days—the reason I can still feel their force in my stomach—is because things (in this case, a very specific toddler) are heavy. By “heavy” I mean they aren’t bland or neutral or inconsequential. Rather, heaviness is an intuition of importance and value. The fact that this child exists is good in some basic sense—he shouldn’t be lost.
When I’m attentive, that experience of weight seems to show up constantly. It’s there in deep conversations with friends, and in a moment of honesty with colleagues. It’s there when I think about the fragile relationship between water and land in my home state of Colorado (which I love, and don’t want to see shrivel away in drought). It’s also in the experience of walking through an old neighborhood in DC.
There is a strange resonance between some external thing and one’s prior sense of the world. This encounter with the weight of a thing is not a matter of satisfying desire. One does have desires, but one’s response to the world has to be more than desire —things are not heavy because of what they can bring to me, but because of what they are in and of themselves.
Not that any of this cures us of our urban sadness. But perhaps it leaves us with a world that is not as small as our sadness makes it out to be.
This is a beautiful essay, Sam.
I am traveling in Krakow with my son who is nearly 20, and later to Budapest alone. After reading your essay, I feel the satisfying weight of fatherhood. Fatherhood is “heavy” in your sense and yet it is also well-fitted to my being. In this way it is also light—joyous.
To be with this young man. To hear his ideas. To feel his love of travel and the world. To hear Chopin. To visit Auschwitz. To have a beer with him. These are the antidotes to anxiety and dread. But I must also carry the weight.
Blessings on this day.
Such a poignant Monday note! Weaving together all the great pieces, podcasts and chats over the past few weeks. Rewarding in its seriousness. Thanks for the reflection!