A little after two in the morning, somewhere on the long drive north out of North Carolina, the world finally agreed to leave me alone. The day had been a joyous one, given over to a wedding uniting a friend I love dearly and his beautiful bride. Another bout of mitfreude, if you will. And now what followed was the long drive home. Shannon had taken us a good ways into West Virginia, but then came my turn at the wheel. The traffic had thinned and then disappeared the way it does in the morning hours, until it was only me, the mile markers, and a gas-station coffee I had bought less for the caffeine than for the company. Now my wife and son were in angelic sleep beside me. The dashboard glowed. The white lines came up out of the dark like a slow, steady heartbeat. Headlights found a hundred feet of asphalt and no more, and beyond that the night simply waited. I had the sensation I only ever seem to get on these drives — that the little clock on the radio had stopped meaning anything at all. I was not early. I was not late. I was nowhere on any schedule, and for a few hours my only appointment was with the dark road in front of me. I even forgot that I had to round on patients in three hours.

Nothing about this is objectively magnificent, and I want to be honest about that. It is a grown man trying to stay awake in a Toyota, lukewarm coffee in the cupholder, negotiating with a bladder he probably should have dealt with back in Raleigh. And yet I have come to believe these are among the most quietly alive hours I am ever given.

They have a soundtrack, these drives, and it hasn't changed in twenty years. When the road empties out, I reach for Jack Johnson — not the sunny hits everyone knows from the album that made him famous, but the first two records, the quieter ones that came before. Those early songs are barely in a hurry to be songs at all — a guitar, a voice, a little patience — and on a black highway they don't so much play as keep you company. I found them in high school, driving home late from a friend's house, and the music seemed to belong to the empty road and the stars over it, to settle into the passenger seat and ask for nothing. They followed me to college in the deep woods of New Hampshire, on the late drive back through the pines to Hanover, where a large part of me had really grown up. It's the same small ceremony every time: empty road, low music, the day finally over. An unedited hour of stillness, communion with the night. I simply can't hear those opening notes without some part of me being seventeen again, going nowhere fast and perfectly content. Just imagine if someone, somewhere, had the kind of foresight to write a country song about this sublime peace on the open road.

Jack isn’t country, though. What took me years to notice is that the very first song on the very first record is hiding a rather esoteric argument. “Inaudible Melodies” is the most relaxed song you can imagine, and tucked inside it is a quarrel with a dead Soviet filmmaker. Johnson studied film before he ever sold a record — he made surf movies, learned the grammar of the cut in an editing room — and somewhere in that schooling he picked up an objection. Midway through the song, in the mildest voice you have ever heard, he suggests that Eisenstein should just relax.

Sergei Eisenstein was the father of montage, the man who taught the movies that meaning is manufactured in the cut. Set two images hard against each other — a face, then an empty chair; a face, then a coffin — and the collision itself produces a feeling that lives in neither picture alone. It was a real discovery, and it has long since become the air we breathe. The trailer, the highlight reel, the thirty-second sizzle that makes you cry before the film has started, the endless scroll that is really just montage with no movie attached — all of it is Eisenstein. It is the persuasion that comes from speed and juxtaposition, from chopping experience into pieces and slamming them together until they add up to something.

Johnson's quarrel was on behalf of the opposite instinct, and that instinct too has a patron saint. A generation later, another Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky, came to believe nearly the reverse — that the truest thing a film could do was not to cut at all, but to hold one moment long enough for it to surrender its secret. In his next-to-last picture, made far from home near the end of his life, he stood a man at one end of a long-drained pool, handed him a lit candle, and asked him to carry it to the far side without letting the flame die. Each time the wind took it, the man walked back and started over. Tarkovsky filmed the whole thing in a single unbroken shot — nearly nine minutes, no edits, the camera just keeping pace — because, he said, he wanted to hold an entire human life inside one frame, beginning to end. Some people find the scene unbearably dull. Others call it the realest thing they have ever watched. Both are responding to the same fact: nothing is coming to rescue them. There is no cut on the way. The meaning belongs only to whoever is willing to stay.

I think this is what Johnson understood from his very first song, and what I keep relearning at two in the morning on an empty highway. We have taken Eisenstein's discovery and made it the grammar of a whole life. We narrate moments while we are still standing in them. We skip the slow parts. We let the frame tell us where to look and quietly cut away everything a good editor would remove — the silences, the dead air, the in-between. We have grown so fluent in the cut that the long take can feel like a malfunction, like time we ought to be doing something with. And it works, the way montage works, right until you notice that the experiences you would give anything to keep are the very ones that refuse to be cut. Grief is a long take. So is coming to know a person. So is a feeling you have to sit inside for an hour before it becomes the thing it was always going to become. None of it survives compression. None of it can be reached any faster than the speed of the thing itself.

The night drive is a long take, and that is its whole genius. For once it strands you at the pace of a person with nowhere to be — no notification worth checking, no next thing to get to, no editor in your ear insisting that something better is one cut away. At that pace, and just about only at that pace, something improbable becomes possible: the hours stop adding up. Time turns from something you are spending into something you are simply in. When Emily Dickinson wrote that forever is composed of nows, she wasn't being mystical. She meant it almost mechanically — that eternity isn't somewhere you arrive later but the plain texture of an ordinary moment, felt the instant you stop straining toward the next one.

The moments you will keep forever are not the ones you managed to capture; they are the long takes — the unhurried and unedited and gloriously uneventful stretches you were in no rush to leave. You will not get to them by going faster. You get there the way the man crossed the pool: by guarding the small flame, and walking. I’m with Jack on this one; Eisenstein should just relax.

John

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John Conrad