We were each other looking out.

humanity, quotes, , ,

“Late one winter afternoon as I was walking to a class that I had to teach, I noticed the beginnings of what promised to be one of the great local sunsets. There was just the right kind of clouds and the sky was starting to burn and the bare trees were black as soot against it. When I got to the classroom, the lights were all on, of course, and the students were chattering, and I was just about to start things off when I thought of the sunset going on out there in the winter dusk, and on impulse, without warning, I snapped off the classroom lights.

“I am not sure that I ever had a happier impulse. The room faced west so as soon as it went dark, everything disappeared except what we could see through the windows, and there it was—the entire sky on fire by then, like the end of the world or the beginning of the world.

“You might think that somebody would have said something. Teachers do not usually plunge their students into that kind of darkness, and you might have expected a wisecrack or two or at least the creaking of chairs as people turned around to see if the old bird had finally lost his mind. But the astonishing thing was that the silence was as complete as you can get it in a room full of people, and we all sat there unmoving for as long as it took the extraordinary spectacle to fade slowly away.

“For over twenty minutes nobody spoke a word. Nobody did anything. We just sat there in the near-dark and watched one day of our lives come to an end, and it is no immodesty to say that it was a great class because my only contribution was to snap off the lights and then hold my tongue. And I am not being sentimental about sunsets when I say that it was a great class because in a way the sunset was the least of it.

“What was great was the unbusy-ness of it. It was taking unlabeled, unallotted time just to look with maybe more than our eyes at what was wonderfully there to be looked at without any obligation to think any constructive thoughts about it or turn it to any useful purpose later, without any weapon at hand in the dark to kill the time it took. It was the sense too that we were not just ourselves individually looking our at the winter sky but that we were in some way also each other looking out at it. We were bound together there simply by the fact of our being human, by our splendid insignificance in face of what was going on out there through the window, and by our curious significance in face of what was going on in there in that classroom.

“The way this world works, people are very apt to use the words they speak not so much as a way of revealing but, rather, as a way of concealing who they really are and what they really think, and that is why more than a few moments of silence with people we do not know well are apt to make us so tense and uneasy. Stripped of our verbal camouflage, we feel unarmed against the world and vulnerable, so we start babbling about anything just to keep the silence at bay. But if we can bear to let it be, silence, of course, can be communion at a very deep level indeed, and that half hour of silence was precisely that, and perhaps that was the greatest part of it all.”

— Frederick Buechner

Jan Schmuckal, Sunset on the Pass

First read on Bologna.

10 thoughts on “We were each other looking out.”

  1. Years ago, I read The Storm by Buechner, and I have been racking my brain, trying to remember the name of the book or author. As soon as I saw that name, I knew I had found it. Thank you!

    That was a lovely quote.

    AMDG

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  3. I have to say this is one of the most unique experiences I have ever read about–the fact that the students all sat in silence and experienced the sunset without wisecracks or demands that the lights be turned on so they could “get their money’s worth.” My daughter teaches at the community college level, and I will have to discuss this with her, how she thinks her students would have reacted.

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      1. I have read quite a few articles by Buechner over the decades, but the only book I read was The Sacred Journey, which I loved very much. But I didn’t keep it, and don’t remember much. Maybe I need to revisit it…

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  6. In 2000, on my first visit to Prague, I was travelling in an old Czech train, where I ended up in a compartment with seating for 8 (as opposed to 6 in the same room in a German train) with a man probably twenty years older than me who was getting drunker the more time passed, although I, without having any experience around drunk people, only knew that I was getting more and more uncomfortable around him. However, I had a ticket and a reservation for my seat, and I’m enough of a rule-follower that it hadn’t occurred to me yet that I should just leave. However, wouldn’t you know, but two young American women – also college students, and right around my age – opened the door and decided to sit in the compartment as well. The three of us – and I only remember that one of them was named Kirsten – chatted together like we were old friends catching up. Eventually, the man left the compartment, and the three of us breathed a sigh of relief. Besides the open seats, one mentioned that they sat there because they didn’t want me alone with the guy. We watched the sun set over the Czech countryside; one of the most brilliant sunsets I’ve ever seen in my life, the entire sky filled with brilliant pinks and purples and the sun turning the clouds into something that looked like molten gold pooled and stretched across the sky. The end station was Prague, and we pulled in as the last purples were fading into the deep blue of nighttime. I never saw those two again. If we traded contact info, I lost it somewhere. For all the people I met on that trip, and all the people I traded info with, there’s only one I contacted later. I had experienced two wonders sent by God on that train to Prague – one of His protection, and one of His beauty.

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