"It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for"
About this Quote
Waiting distorts the world the way hunger does: it sharpens certain details and dulls everything else. Giraudoux nails that asymmetry with a small, sly observation that doubles as a moral x-ray. The people who are waiting for you should, in theory, weigh on your conscience; instead they blur into background. Meanwhile the person you are waiting for becomes overexposed, practically cinematic. It is not just that impatience makes us attentive. It is that desire - for reassurance, romance, approval, an answer - edits reality with ruthless efficiency.
As a dramatist, Giraudoux is staging a scene in a single sentence: two parties in the same story, experiencing radically different lighting cues. The line’s elegance is in its quiet indictment. It describes a perceptual glitch, then lets you notice the self-centeredness hiding inside it. When you wait, you are forced into stillness, which turns the other person into the engine of the moment. When others wait for you, you remain the engine; they become props.
Written against the backdrop of early 20th-century Europe - a culture of appointments, letters, delays, mobilizations - the observation carries extra bite. Modernity promised coordination and control; it also produced new forms of suspended time. Giraudoux’s subtext is that power often looks like making someone else wait, and that our attention follows power, not virtue. The clearest figures in our lives aren’t always the ones who deserve clarity; they’re the ones who hold the clock.
As a dramatist, Giraudoux is staging a scene in a single sentence: two parties in the same story, experiencing radically different lighting cues. The line’s elegance is in its quiet indictment. It describes a perceptual glitch, then lets you notice the self-centeredness hiding inside it. When you wait, you are forced into stillness, which turns the other person into the engine of the moment. When others wait for you, you remain the engine; they become props.
Written against the backdrop of early 20th-century Europe - a culture of appointments, letters, delays, mobilizations - the observation carries extra bite. Modernity promised coordination and control; it also produced new forms of suspended time. Giraudoux’s subtext is that power often looks like making someone else wait, and that our attention follows power, not virtue. The clearest figures in our lives aren’t always the ones who deserve clarity; they’re the ones who hold the clock.
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| Topic | Deep |
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