The Price of Closeness

I like it when an evening spills over the edges of the table, when two parties who did not know each other before fall into conversation. The exchange that does not end at your own tablecloth means a great deal to me. And yet there is this one guest everyone knows, who turns up in every place sooner or later. He does not simply sit down at a table, he docks. At the counter, at the bar, or wherever you have long been sitting and suddenly find yourself with company you never asked for. He comes closer than the conversation requires, the distance shrinks with every sentence, and the sentences have no end, only commas. You nod, because nodding is the only movement left to you. The glass in your hand becomes the only vanishing point you have, while your gaze searches over his shoulder for an excuse that does not come.

I have experienced this often, at unfamiliar counters and at ones I know well. The counter is a place where distance is negotiated without a word ever being said about it. Most conversations keep to a silent agreement about how much closeness is allowed, how long eye contact may last before it becomes an imposition. And then there are those who do not know this agreement or do not want to know it. They take you into their possession, literally, you become the enclosure for a stream of talk that takes no account of exits.

That is the side of community one is reluctant to talk about. One prefers to tell of the table where strangers find each other, of the glass that joins two people who did not know each other before. That is true too. But it is only half the bill. Whoever sits down in an open place does not choose his neighbours. The room has no filter for empathy or its absence. Whoever comes, comes, with his warmth and with his hunger for an audience, and the two look confusingly alike until you are in the middle of it.

There is an old thought that turns on the question of what we owe one another the moment we meet at all. Not what we owe each other because we like each other or because a contract demands it, but solely because a face is standing in front of us. This debt has no grace period. It begins before you have incurred it. At the counter that becomes very concrete. You still owe the one who comes too close a minimum of attention, and it is precisely this minimum that he draws out of you entirely, sentence by sentence, until the supply for your own evening runs short.

Sometimes there is more behind this boundlessness than bad manners. You recognise it by four traits that seldom appear alone: the missing empathy, the quiet belittling of others, the touchiness as soon as a word sounds like criticism, and an egocentricity that tolerates no counterpart, only an audience. These four disturb community more than most people realise, in the family, at work and indeed in the restaurant. The only difference is that a table is easier to escape than a family.

You could say that this is the price. Not the price of a glass, but the price of going among people at all. Whoever wants community cannot buy it piecemeal, only the friendly parts, only the ones that give you energy. It comes whole or not at all, with the person who quietly watches you from the side without exchanging a word, and with the one who talks too close into your face and does not notice how you slowly retreat, centimetre by centimetre, until you bump against the counter and can go no further.

I have learnt not to see this as a mishap of the evening. It belongs to it. Whoever pulls the door shut behind him and sits down at a stranger's table tacitly accepts this part. The embrace belongs to it, just as the conversation that actually takes you further belongs to it. You cannot have the one without the other, any more than you can have a sea without salt.

What remains is the question of how to deal with the moments that drain you, without going straight home. I have no elegant answer to that, only an observation. The encounters I have taken the most from were rarely the easy ones. They were the ones in which I stayed although I would rather have left. Something about this holding out opens you to things you would otherwise have spared yourself. Not always pleasant. But rarely without consequence.

Perhaps that is the real price of community. Not the money you pay for a glass of wine, but the time you hand over without getting it back, and the closeness you bear without having sought it. Whoever does not want to pay it stays at home. Whoever pays it occasionally gets something in return that cannot be bought.