Double Hamster on The Rocks

I spent half of the drive behind the wheel and half in the passenger seat as Keri and Laura drove. Linnea sat next to me and then in the back, behind the drivers seat: the Partial Boston Subsection of the Fifth North Crew (PBS-FNC).

The PBS-FNC spent most the two full NYC days in Manhattan, at galleries and museums. I spent the two days in Long Island City, snuffling and coughing and hiding out with Nancy, who is also sick. Nancy celebrated the New York half of her 31st birthday on Saturday night. My parents had come to New York to see a play the night before and we met them in Mid-Town Manhattan for breakfast on Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon is a blur, but B-Coy and Alise and Aki and Mayu and people and people and people showed up for the party and so I ended up sleeping at the Comfort Inn near the Queensboro Bridge in LIC.

But now it’s Monday.

I wake in Long Island City and it’s 8:30 in the morning and I am walking to Café Brasil on Vernon Av, past The Bodega That Has Almost Everything and The Liquor Store That Has Very Little and The Restaurant That Has Surprisingly Good French Food For Breakfast and I’m walking past The Church That Looks Like Every Catholic Church That I Ever Attended When I Was Growing Up when I see a late middle aged man in torn clothes standing inside the gates in front of the steps that lead up to the big wooden Catholic doors.

He has a thick brown polyfill jacket and frayed boots above a short pair of wool pants and big plastic trash bag on his back and he’s reading the big schedule sign out front. It occurs to me that I should say good morning and see how he’s doing but I decide that I’ll ask after I get out of the café and of course he’s gone by the time that I get out.

Most of the decisions that alter our lives are either split second or long term aren’t they? Split second: say hello, buy a drink at the bar, run into the burning building to get the puppy, help the old lady across the street so she can harass the flower lady at the newsstand. Long term: choose a career, choose a college, get married.

It is interesting that we tend to operate in the middle distance. Here the goals are fixed and short-term and we are flexible when we approach them. The coffee decision was in the middle distance. I’d been planning to get some the evening before. I’d been thinking about it when I turned off the television, closed the door to my room, and passed out. The decision to drive to New York was in the middle distance, as was the decision to hang out with Nancy. All of these things sat on my list of things to do.

Why didn’t I stop and say hello to the man with the plastic bag? I had extra cash. I’m sure he could have used some money for breakfast. It would have been useful, really. I didn’t stop because he didn’t sit in my focal plane.

The focal plane interests me. It’s the midpoint where possibility becomes limited. We can do a thousand things in the long term and a million in the short but only a few activities require the limited planning that places them outside the domain of impulse but below the level of a career decision. A few days ago, I wrote about snow, and about statistics. Statistics allowed us to see patterns in snow by ignoring or throwing out data. In the same way, we make decisions in the middle distance by ignoring the myriad of possible impulsive behaviors while avoiding the expanse of the long term. Form becomes liberating. In the middle distance, we see less and it allows us to do more.

Unfortunately, the enforced blindness to possibility that characterizes the middle distance seems morally neutral. In the long term, most people want to be good and decent. Most truly impulsive acts are random and can either be good or bad, beneficial or adversarial. It is only in the middle, when our actions are decisive but have no long term outlook, that we are capable of horrible cruelty in the name of “doing one’s job.” I imagine that the bureaucrats that managed the paperwork behind Auschwitz and Treblinka operated in this middle distance. They were doing their job, happy in this moral vacuum. The same can be said of the NKVD bureaucrats that ran Stalin’s purges.

Sounds extreme, no? Of course, we wouldn’t agree to become a part of such machines. We sooner die, right? Not, I think, without certain training or a certain framework. I’m imagining the framework that allowed Natan Sharansky to risk death in order to keep his Bible in the gulag and the framework that allowed Solzhenitsyn to place himself at risk by writing his account of the Soviet Prison camp system after eight years in its maw. What allowed these two to see past the middle distance? What habit of mind had they formed? How do I form similar habits? Where can I learn this mental kung-fu that would allow me to see someone in a torn coat standing outside The Church That Looks Like Every Catholic Church That I Ever Attended When I Was Growing Up and step out of my focal plane in a second? It’s not so easy but it’s worth practicing, isn’t it?