ABSTRACT
In the German original, Gadamer uses the word “verweilen,” which is here translated as “to dwell upon” and “to tarry.” The slightly archaic verb “to tarry” emphasizes the “specific” way of waiting implied in verweilen: “The Weile [the “while” in verweilen, tarrying] has this very special temporal structure,” Gadamer explains in an interview, “a temporal structure of being moved, which one nevertheless cannot describe merely as duration, because duration means only further movement
in a single direction. . . . [W]e learn from the work of art how to tarry.”2 Tarrying, moreover, does not involve tedium. It is a tarrying that might turn into the kind of waiting that Odysseus experiences on Calypso’s island. Tarrying might turn into waiting when we give it a temporal direction (say, into the future) or an intention (to do something or to arrive somewhere). The less we wait impatiently, the more we tarry leisurely. The more we tarry, Gadamer suggests, the more the work of art reveals, because in tarrying we wait without object or purpose. In tarrying, we are receptive to let a work of art display its manifold riches to us. If we learn how to tarry in the finite temporality of the work of art, we intuit the infinite of which the work of art is a part.3
