Saturday night, while making dinner for my wife and children, I was listening to The Beths, a power pop band I’d discovered on a podcast a few weeks before. I felt a pang of loneliness, in the midst of all this domestic abundance, and a friend came to my mind. In between actions at the stove and cutting board, I sent him a text—“How are you?”—hoping to gauge his availability for a post-dinner drink.
After a few minutes, the Bluetooth speaker pinged to tell me he replied: “Good. Watching Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid with the boy.”
The boy is my friend’s son.
“How’s it hold up?” I asked.
“Perfectly.”
Post-dinner, instead of a drink with my friend, the family and I sat down, and we, too, watched Butch Cassidy, after fruitlessly searching for it on both of our streaming services and finding we had to pay $3.99 for a 24-hour rental. My friend was right. The movie, which I hadn’t seen in years, holds up…mostly. Some of the musical choices are egregious.
Next morning, this particular, er, quality of the movie still thrumming through my brain, I decided to do something that for 99.85% of human civilization (the math is sound; I used my iPhone’s calculator) nobody would have imagined: I mentioned it on Facebook: “Watched Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid last night w/ the family. Wow the music cues are weird. Here’s the Bolivian bank-robbery & being-chased-by-police montage music.”
I cannot think of any virtuous impulse that compelled me to share such a thing. And then I went to church.
On my way—my two kids drove separately, since I had an errand to do after service, and my wife stayed home to work in the garden—I heard on NPR a report about the thousands of Bahamians displaced by Hurricane Dorian, their homes destroyed, their places of work destroyed. The lack of power on the islands. The lack of fresh water, of medicine, of communication systems, of ways to leave. Hundreds were waiting at a port for cruise ships, turned into rescue ships, to bring them safely to U.S. shores, a fact that filled me with low-level dread. Would they be welcomed here? [Answer: No.]
The music, the phone, the movie, social media. My Bluetooth speaker, my Internet connection, my TV, my family’s two cars. The world’s troubles at my ear, dispersed by the next story, the next thing, as if by the wind. Pangs of loneliness everywhere amidst the abundance.
Just after 1800, William Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away…”
I do not think anyone reading this will have trouble connecting Wordsworth’s lines to our present moment of distraction, of misdirected energies, of the death, or rumors of death, of the Amazon, the Great Barrier Reef, the Greenland ice sheet.
Back to Butch Cassidy, which had paused for a couple, blessed hours all such concern: The incongruity of bank robbers being chased through a Bolivian countryside as manic, harmonized scat-singing plays over the soundtrack does have a kind of integrity: It’s a deliberate if strange choice, made by people working together on the slow, laborious work of assembling a movie about friendship. Sustained attention is always admirable. Haiku, the first genre of poetry I ask my students to make every semester, requires and cultivates a practice of attention: “Learn about pines from the pine,” Basho writes. “And about bamboo from the bamboo.”
And about people from people.
When I sat with my sons at church (we met up), we were among a group of people who looked troubled in a way that was hard to miss. Some were holding back tears, some were holding each other in hugs. A few just looked forlorn. I soon learned the reason why: They were in mourning. A member of the congregation had died suddenly the day before. She was 50.
As the announcement was made, the woman’s life as a member of the church was described. We learned that she regularly missed the main service because she helped provide childcare for 3-year-olds, every week for many years. We also learned she had a heart condition, diagnosed when she was a girl, with the expectation that she would not make it past 20. Each morning she woke up, we were told, she would say, “I’m grateful to be alive.”
With that gratitude, this woman attended to her community’s children, gave their parents a break. It was not all she did, of course, and it’s not clear to me how much she struggled with what Wordsworth calls “the multitude of causes, unknown to former times … acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind,” nor with “the rapid communication” that “hourly gratifies.” Yet I am grateful for her example of faithfulness to a humble and profound cause: Taking care of children who will likely have few memories of her kindness. (This may be why I did not know her. By the time we joined the church, my sons were in middle school.)
Such sustained attention requires what might be called a with-ness: A presence that does not gratify because it is; a presence that does not vanish because it’s found in a person, right there, enacting it, waiting for you to come.
And then one day it’s not. Registered palpably on the faces around me was the pain of that absence, a pain that would not have been so acute if not for this woman’s very real presence, week in and week out, in all of their lives, in this particular place, with its particular mission. She is why they hurt, and why they comforted each other. That is a witness to life, friends, and a claim against loneliness.
