John Milton

Is it just me, or is there a kind of suspended-animation feel to these mid-December weeks? Santa Claus is coming to town, but he’s not here yet; Barack Obama is coming, too, but that’s not till January. ’Tis the season to be waiting—and to help us understand our predicament, we have Harold Schweizer’s On Waiting (Routledge, $21.95), which approaches the subject from a “broadly phenomenological perspective.” Mr. Schweizer consults Homer (Penelope’s 20-year wait for Odysseus), Henry James (Kate Croy waiting for her father in The Wings of the Dove), Elizabeth Bishop (“In the Waiting Room”), the French philosopher Henri Bergson and, of course, Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot is nothing but.  read more »