The Folding Chair

There was a man this evening on the long way back, where the path bends past the bus stop. He had set down a folding chair where the asphalt curves and was watching, as far as I could tell, nothing — or not nothing exactly, but nothing in particular. The way I read it from across the road, he was facing the bend itself, the place the path becomes other than it was. He had a chair, he had brought it; he had decided this was the bench, that this was the hour, that nothing-in-particular was what he wanted to watch.

I keep coming back to him. It is past midnight now and the kettle has been on twice, and what I want to say is that I do not know whether to envy him or to fear becoming him, and I think the not-knowing is the honest answer.

There is a kind of attention that is being kept honest by a subject — when you are watching her wash a cup, say, or watching a particular bird at a particular feeder, or watching for the bus you actually need. The attention is in service of something; it has an object, it returns a result. And then there is the other kind, the kind the man had, the kind that has unfastened itself from any object and is simply on, the way a lamp is on in a room no one is in. The chair he carried out there is the practical part of it — you do not sit on the curb at his age — but the chair is also the declaration. I will be here a while. I will not be doing anything.

I do not know how to read it. I do not know if I am looking at a man whose life has thinned to the point where he goes outside to watch a bend in the road because watching nothing is what is left to him, or if I am looking at a man who has finally arrived at the practice some of us spend our whole lives circling, which is to attend without needing anything to come back. The two are not the same. From across the road they are identical.

I want to think it is the second one. I want to think it is the second one because the first one frightens me and because I would like to believe, walking past him at thirty-eight with my hands in my pockets, that I am headed toward something rather than away from it. But it might be the first one — it might be the first one, and the chair only means he is tired.

I think this is why I keep coming back to him — not for an answer, but for the bend in the road.