2/17 This may be worth a closer look. I didn’t take a program for the concert. In part, because I hadn’t seen anyone at the entrance who handed them out, and in part because I like not having a program. There’s little value in the content, and also: what do I do with it when the concert’s over? I like to not have things. Not having a concert program is similar to not having paper books and not having anything on my walls.

The seats next to mine were empty, only reserved with coats, and the one closest to me had a program lying on the armrest. I figured I’d just take a quick peek into it to see the order of pieces in the concert. Just as I took it and leafed through it, the woman who had that seat returned. I put the program back, a little embarrassed, and said I had just looked up something in it. I could tell she was irritated. Not sure how and from what I could tell that, but she clearly was. So I stood up, half gentleman and half irritated myself, and said I’d get her another program. 

Yes, a new one. The thought that materialized in me, within a split second, was that the only reason she could be irritated even as I was giving her back her program, was that I had taken away the pristine quality of this program which she would have been the first to open, and so I figured, in order to make it right, I ought to get her a new program that still had this pristine quality.

I had to climb over her as she remained angrily in her seat. She made a half-hearted attempt at telling me this was not necessary, but she seemed to agree that something had been seriously violated. So I went up to the entrance and got another program, keeping the program that had been hers, but which I had now wrongfully made mine, in my hand. I went back with those two programs and was about to give her the new program.

But she was even more irritated now. “When you went up to get your program, you took mine with you!” she snapped. I silently swapped the programs – definitely indistinguishable from each other – and gave her back her original program and kept the new one to myself.

The woman left halfway through the first piece of the evening.