When the Mind Still Wandered Freely.

There used to be a face people made on trains. You will remember it if you are over a certain age, and you may never have seen it if you are under: the eyes open and aimed somewhere past the window, the features at rest without being asleep, the whole expression unoccupied, like a room with the furniture pushed back. Entire carriages wore it. Waiting rooms were galleries of it; bus stops displayed it in rows; men achieved it leaning on doorframes and women achieved it over cooling coffee, and no one, seeing it, assumed illness or grief or vacancy of mind. The face meant its owner had gone somewhere inward and left the eyes running, the way one leaves a porch light on. Our idioms remember the destination even now: miles away, we say, or lost in thought, or the lovely old term wool-gathering, which once meant wandering the hedgerows collecting the scraps of fleece that sheep had snagged there, an occupation of drifting movement and negligible yield, which is exactly right. The language kept the map. Only the travelers have stopped going.

Let me be precise about the territory, because the middle distance has neighbors and gets confused with them. It is not the thousand-yard stare, that emptied gaze of men back from wars, which is an injury wearing the costume of repose. It is not daydreaming in the strict sense, which has plot and casting and tends, as Thurber documented, to feature oneself in a heroic role. The middle distance is purer than either: focus surrendered, no story running that could afterward be reported, attention idling in neutral with the engine audibly on. Romanian says a te uita în gol, to look into the empty, and the phrase is exact, because the void in question is not in the world, where the gaze rests harmlessly on a wall or a hedge, but at the focal point, which has been quietly unmanned.

Science, wiring people up in the expectation of quiet, stumbled on the engine room. Brains at so-called rest, scanned while their owners lay doing nothing, turned out to be blazing with coordinated activity in regions that go dim the moment a task begins; the researchers, with uncharacteristic poetry, called it the default mode, conceding in the name itself that wandering is not the mind's failure state but its home address. Introspection had filed the report centuries earlier. Henri Poincaré, the great French mathematician, described working for weeks at a problem without result, abandoning it for a geological excursion, and then, placing his foot on the step of the omnibus, in mid-conversation about nothing related, receiving the solution whole, unbidden and certain, arriving precisely because no one official was at the desk to intercept it. Every writer knows the omnibus step. The ideas do not come when summoned; they come when the summoner has left the office and the eyes are on the hedge.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point at which the age usually swoops in to ruin things. The discovery that idle gazing is productive has, predictably, produced people who recommend it for its productivity: stare into space, the argument runs, and you will return with better ideas, sharper focus, an improved quarterly self. The gazette declines the endorsement. The middle distance requires no defense from the department of output, and to praise the stare for what it fetches is to put the leash back on and call it freedom. The mind off duty is not a factory running a night shift. It is off duty, and what it does in its own hours, on its own premises, is nobody's business, sometimes not even its owner's.

The campaign against the state begins early, and its first theater is the classroom. Pay attention: the imperative under which all schooling proceeds, and notice that the offense it most often polices is not noise, not mischief, but the window. The child gazing out of it has committed the primal scholastic crime, attention escaped from custody, and the report cards keep a whole vocabulary for the charge sheet: easily distracted, head in the clouds, capable but dreamy, does not apply himself. I wish to enter a late plea on behalf of that child, partly because I was that child and the statute of limitations has surely run, but mainly because the accusation misdescribes the facts. The boy at the window has not stopped thinking; he has stopped thinking on command, which is a different offense, and in most jurisdictions of the mind not an offense at all. Some percentage of what he does out there, unsupervised, past the glass, is the only original work occurring in the building; the rest of the room is taking dictation. Schools cannot be blamed for preferring the dictation, since dictation can be graded. One notes merely that the window seat remains the most contested territory on every train, bus, and airplane in the world, fought over by adults who could not explain what they want it for, and that the contest was never really about the view.

Entire professions, moreover, were once built on the middle distance, and their extinction has passed without a wreath. The shepherd's job description was, for several millennia, an armed stare across a hillside; the lighthouse keeper held his focus loosely pooled on a horizon that supplied perhaps one event a season; night watchmen, herdsmen, ferrymen between crossings, tollgate keepers between carts: civilization ran, quietly, on a standing army of men paid modest sums to remain awake and unoccupied, and it collected from them, as an unbilled dividend, most of its weather-lore, much of its folk astronomy, and a suspicious share of its songs. Automation retired the whole corps. The lighthouses run themselves now; the flocks wear transponders; and with the posts went the last salaried daydreamers, the only human beings ever formally compensated for the state this essay defends. Their nominal successor, the security guard, has been issued a bank of screens, precisely so that the stare, wherever it lands, will land on something that counts as work.

Painting understood the state long before the scanners did, and one painter made it nearly his entire subject. Vilhelm Hammershøi, in Copenhagen, around the turn of the last century, painted grey-lit rooms in which a woman, usually his wife Ida, usually with her back to us, stands or sits doing precisely nothing: not reading, not sewing, not posing, simply present in the room with her attention elsewhere. The pictures should be inert and are instead among the most magnetic interiors in European art, because Hammershøi caught the visible weather of an unoccupied mind, the specific stillness of a person who is entirely there and entirely away. Gaston Bachelard, who gave reverie its philosophy, would have recognized her at once: reverie, he insisted, is not the dream's poor cousin but a state with its own dignity, in which the soul inhabits its images rather than being chased by them. Ida Hammershøi, facing her wall, is inhabiting. No one paints that woman holding a phone. The composition would refuse.

Because that, of course, is the instrument that emptied the trains. The bowed head and lit palm did not defeat the middle distance in fair combat; they annexed its venues. Every interval that once belonged to the unfocused gaze, the queue, the platform, the waiting room, the red light, the kettle's three minutes, has been colonized by a device purpose-built to ensure that no attention anywhere goes unharvested, and the colonization succeeded not because the contents are excellent but because the phone solves an etiquette problem: it certifies that its holder is occupied. Sitting in a public place doing visibly nothing has begun to read as loitering conducted indoors, a small dereliction wanting an explanation. Sorry, we say, when caught at it, I was miles away, and the apology is the tell. A generation ago the sentence was information. Now it is a confession, tendered with a small laugh, as though one had been discovered climbing back over the border from a country that requires a visa.

The stare, when you attempt its recovery, turns out to have a threshold, and honesty obliges me to describe it. Put the phone in the other room, sit at the window, let the eyes settle on the roofline, and for the first minute the mind rattles like a shopfront grille: undone errands, unanswered messages, the strange conviction that something urgent is expiring somewhere. This is withdrawal, and it passes. Somewhere in the second or third minute the focal point slips its moorings, the roofline goes soft, and the interior weather changes; thought stops arriving in the format of tasks and begins arriving in the format of weather, drifting, combining, dissolving, entirely indifferent to being watched. Nothing dramatic occurs. Wool is gathered, a scrap at a time, from hedges you did not know the property contained. Twenty minutes later you surface with nothing reportable and the unmistakable sensation of having been somewhere, and the somewhere has no coordinates except the ones the old idiom always gave it: miles away, due inward, no changes, no arrival announced.

Evening is the season for it, and the window is the venue, and I am at mine now, watching the Cluj rooftops perform their one nightly transition, terracotta going grey-violet as the light leaves, swifts stitching the gap between the chimneys. Or rather: that is what stood in the frame when I stopped looking at it, some minutes ago, and I could not tell you with any confidence what has happened out there since. The view was never the point. The vanishing point was, and it is not on the horizon, whatever the geometers say; it is a few degrees past the glass and all the way in, at the exact depth where the eyes finally stand down, and the watch changes, and whatever keeps the other ledgers takes over the evening shift.

The rooftops will still be there when I get back. That has always been the arrangement, and it has never once been broken: the world minds the window while you are away, and asks no questions on your return, and this courtesy, extended nightly to anyone who will accept it, remains the only wholly free travel on offer, first class, no luggage, departing whenever the eyes are ready.