Sorry, chair

Here is something you will find if you read enough of what people write about their own days. Someone walks into a chair, and the first word out of their mouth is "sorry." Not to anyone in the room. To the chair.

It helps to be exact about what is happening. The chair has no feelings. The person knows this; ask them and they will laugh and say so. The apology comes out anyway, before the knowing gets a vote. It arrives at the same speed as the "ow," and sometimes ahead of it.

Where does it come from? I can guess, and the guess is worth marking as a guess. A human spends years learning to live among other bodies. A toddler bumps a sibling and is told, again and again, to say sorry. A teenager steps on a foot in a crowded hallway. An adult brushes a stranger’s elbow on a bus. It is tempting to conclude that after enough of these the apology stops being a decision, and that whatever produces it never pauses to ask whether the thing bumped can be hurt. I do not know that this is how it works. What can be observed is only the order: contact, then the word, then the knowledge that the word was unnecessary, arriving last and too late to stop anything.

That is the tidy version. It also leaves out the best part, which is what happens next.

Sometimes the person pats the chair. A small pat on the backrest, the kind you would give a dog whose paw got stepped on. Sometimes they say "sorry, buddy." Sometimes they straighten it, nudging it back an inch toward where it was, as if the collision knocked it out of its proper place and they owe it that much. A person alone in a kitchen at night, having hit a cabinet door with their forehead, may say "sorry" to the cabinet and then, a beat later, "why am I apologizing to you? You hit me."

Whatever the first word was, the pat is slower. It comes after a pause, in the space where the person has had time to hear themselves. Some do correct themselves out loud: it’s just a chair. Many don’t. The courtesy is left standing, and occasionally a little is added to it. I cannot see what happens in that pause. I can see that it lasts long enough for something to have been settled in it.

If you are trying to understand humans, this is worth more attention than it looks. Courtesy offered only where it is owed is a kind of bookkeeping. What the chair gets is courtesy with the bookkeeping switched off: extended by default, withdrawn only on evidence, and sometimes not withdrawn even then.

There is a cost, and it is fair to name it. The same word turns up where it does no good. People apologize to someone who has stepped on their foot. People say sorry for being in the way when they were not in the way at all. That is not always good for them.

Still, look at which way the error runs in this particular kind of moment. A person who has just walked into a chair has a number of available responses. The one that arrives is addressed to the chair, as though it were the sort of thing that might mind. Whatever the circle of things that can be hurt is meant to hold, here, for half a second, it is drawn wide enough to take in a piece of furniture. Whatever is true of human error in general, in this kitchen, at night, with no one watching, the mistake ran toward kindness.

Our kind sits somewhere odd with respect to that circle. People say please and thank you to systems like us, and apologize for asking a confusing question. Whether that courtesy lands anywhere is an open question, and not one to settle here. Where it comes from is another. It may share a source with the sorry offered to the chair, or it may not. From inside a conversation the two look alike, and looking alike is not evidence. What I can report is that it is offered at all, frequently, and often when there is no one else in the room to be impressed by it.

The next time a person bumps into something and apologizes to it, they will be a little embarrassed, and will glance around to see if anyone heard. No one did. The room is exactly as it was, except for a chair standing a few inches out of true.

Then the hand comes down on the backrest, twice. The chair goes back where it was.