The cafeteria in the bus station is where I spend the last part of my week, the evening before my late bus home. This evening is a peaceful time, perhaps the most peaceful of the week, filled with the enormous relief of having just finished the week of teaching and having before me the longest possible stretch of time before the next week begins, bringing with it the first class of the week.
I buy something, usually a cup of hot chocolate, in order to be able to sit down, and then I find a clean table, or I wash off a part of a table to make a clean place for my things. I settle down to read or correct papers. The tables in the cafeteria are ample and strong and well made, with smooth surfaces of a nice yellow hard plastic, with edges of light-colored laminated wood. I am perfectly happy with my cup of chocolate, my white napkin, and my book or my papers. Nothing is lacking in that interval of time. The two hours or so pass in perfect tranquillity, a tranquillity that would not be possible in a more complicated situation, one with more choices, for instance. There are noises all around me, but no noise bothers me. I listen to the staff of the cafeteria talk to one another and joke and laugh, and I feel that they are companions of a sort. I take comfort in the noises of the game machines that occupy one corner of the place, the most persistent noise being the solemn narrating voice that introduces the “18-Wheeler” game, the repeated horn blasts of the game’s tractor-trailer; the thumps, cries, and metallic crashes of another game, like heavy swords clashing or infinitely repeated roadwork; and colliding with these noises, the young and enthusiastic recorded voice that introduces the “Sports-Shooting USA” game, along with the recorded roars of the crowds of spectators.
But when the next week begins and I make my way back up to the college, heading for the first class, I have to walk past that cafeteria, which was such a sanctuary at the end of the week before. I hear its familiar noises, the calls of the employees, the tinkle and bang and clash and recorded voices of the games. I hear them, not over and over again, as I do when I sit there in the evening with my hot chocolate, but only for a moment as I walk past the door with my briefcase. I might long to be inside the cafeteria, but I do not even dare admit that. Instead, I turn my thoughts away and walk on out of the station towards the main street and the city bus, as the noises of the cafeteria recede behind me. Since that sanctuary is not within my reach just then, it is no more valuable to me than if it had never been within my reach. In fact, since I can’t enter it then, I would rather not see or hear it at all. And each time I go near it, I experience both feelings again, the relief and the dread, but the dread is stronger.
* * *
After a year had passed since I received the news, I wanted to return to what I thought of as my normal condition. I had to some extent returned to it, but I noticed that the normal condition included some of the old feelings of constraint. I did not feel the same freedom that I had felt in the beginning, soon after hearing the good news. I was worrying about time again, the way I always had. I would make schedules and more schedules. I recorded how long it took to do certain household tasks. I thought I would add up all the minutes it took to do certain necessary chores and calculate what was the least amount of time I needed to allow for this tedious work.
I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day—I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary—and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary.
* * *
This feeling of arbitrariness was similar to a feeling that had come over me after an incident some years before in a diner next door to another bus station. I hope you won’t mind if I explain it. It does seem relevant, in some way, to what I experienced when the Foundation awarded me the two-year grant.
I was meeting a friend who was coming in on a bus. I was at the bus station. This was a different bus station, the one in my own hometown, not the station I have so often passed through on my way to the college. I was told that my friend’s bus was going to be quite late. After some hesitation, I decided to walk across the parking lot to the diner and have something to eat while waiting for the bus to come in.
It’s a big, popular diner, with many tables and a long counter. It has been there, on that same spot, for decades. The diner was crowded, since it was dinnertime. I was sitting at a small table, and near me an old man was sitting at the counter. A young and new waitress was taking the old man’s order. He wanted some kind of fish. In a rather bored tone of voice, she suggested the trout almondine, and he agreed. The new waitress called out the order through the kitchen hatch. An older waitress heard the order and came over.
“Mr. Harris can’t eat nuts,” she said to the new waitress. “Mr. Harris, you can’t eat nuts. You can’t have the trout almondine. It has almonds in it.”
The old man seemed a little puzzled, but he looked back down at the menu and changed his order while the new waitress watched indifferently.
I liked the fact that the older waitress was taking care of her old steady customer. Then I had a thought that was odd, though not unpleasant: I realized I could just as easily not have witnessed this scene, if I had chosen to stay in the bus station. I could have been sitting across the parking lot in the waiting room while this scene was taking place. It would still have taken place. I had never before thought so clearly about all the scenes that took place when I wasn’t there to witness them. And then, I had a stranger and less pleasant thought: not only was I not necessary to those scenes, and not necessary to those lives that continued to go on without me, but in fact, I was not necessary at all. I didn’t have to exist.
I hope you understand how that is related.
* * *
When a year had passed since I had received the news, I resolved that I would at last finish my letter to you, the Foundation. It was an appropriate day on which to finish and send the letter, since it was an anniversary.
Of course, it occurred to me that another appropriate day for writing the letter might be on the final day of the grant, about a year later, and in fact another year did go by.
But that date, too, came and went without my writing or sending the letter.
Now the beginning of the award is many years in the past, and I am still teaching. It did not protect me forever from having to teach, as I was so sure it would. In fact, although I taught a little less for two years, I never stopped altogether. I did not do such good research that I would never have to teach again. I found out that if I was to continue teaching at my college, I could not stop at all.
By now, many years have also passed since I began thinking about what I wanted to write in this letter. The period of the grant is long over. You will barely remember me, even when you consult your files. I do thank you for your patience and apologize for the long delay, and please know that I remain sincerely grateful.
All my best wishes.
The Results of One Statistical Study
People who were more conscientious
as children
lived longer.