Charles Bukowski On Waiting in Life ― Pulp

I often say that if writing is art then Bukowski is one of the best artists the world has seen. I say so because I’m yet to find a better craftsman of sentences than Bukowski. The depth he was able to convey in 2 sentences is often far more than what you can get from reading an entire book.

To corroborate my words let’s refer to an excerpt from the book Pulp where Bukowski talks about how the whole human life is none other than a series of clusters of wait. We are always waiting for one thing or the other.

Bukowski, as usual, has expressed this monochromatically tiring wait in the way only he could have.

Without any further ado, here is the excerpt from the book Pulp:―

We waited and waited.
All of us.
Didn’t the shrink know that waiting was one of the things that drove people crazy?
People waited all their lives.
They waited to live, they waited to die.
They waited in line to buy toilet paper.
They waited in line for money.
And if they didn’t have any money they waited in longer lines.
You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken.
You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced.
You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop.
You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again.
You waited in a shrink’s office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.