soon

How soon is soon?

When you say “It’s going to happen soon,” when exactly do you mean? How now is “soon”?

If a movie poster proclaims “COMING SOON,” does that mean next week, next month, three months? Six months? And so on? When does soon stop being soon and become so on?

And if you say “I’ll wash the dishes soon,” does that mean in five minutes, or an hour, or five hours, or tomorrow? Is next week, so soon for a movie to come, not soon enough for dirty dishes to be done?

And is soon getting later? We know that things seem to move faster and faster, and we are less and less patient with delays on our digital devices – the sighs I emit while waiting for Word to wake up could probably turn an air turbine to power my laptop – but when you tell someone “I’ll be there soon,” is it not as soon as it once would have been? When the airport staff tell you your plane will be boarding soon, is it as soon as it used to be?

I ask just because soon, when it was Old English sona, at first meant ‘immediately’; that is to say, if thing A happened and soon thing B happened, that meant that thing B happened as soon as thing A happened – no sooner said than done. Consider this passage from Beowulf (with my translation):

Dura sona onarn,
fyrbendum fæst, syþðan he hire folmum onhran

[The portal popped open,
though fire-forged fast, once his fist touched it]

Or this one:

Sona þæt onfunde fyrena hyrde
þæt he ne mette middangeardes,
eorþan sceata, on elran men,
mundgripe maran.

[Right away he realized, that wrangler of vice,
he’d never met in middle-earth,
on the planes of the planet, in any people,
a greater grip.]

In Old English, sooner and soonest weren’t a thing, for the same reason immediatelier and immediateliest aren’t now (well, there are other reasons for those too). But as soon as Old English had sloped into Middle English – if not sooner – the sense broadened. 

After all, even in Old English you could say soon after (sona æfter) and use soon in relation to relative times, not just the present, so as soon as and the comparative forms were sure to follow promptly. The moment you depart from simultaneity, there is a gap, and gaps of time are always relative… and ultimately flexible. If you’re on your way to meet someone, and perhaps you’re a bit late, and you reckon you’re not more than ten minutes away, will you tell them you’ll be there in five minutes? I have observed that many people will. But why don’t they just leave earlier to get there sooner? Well, you don’t want to be too soon…

But that’s our whole lives. As Wordsworth wrote,

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

Everything that isn’t too late is too soon, and vice versa; we’re never really comfortable inside the now, but we’re impatient and yet never quite ready. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. 

Soon is a promise, a challenge, a taunt; think about the settlers in what is now Oklahoma, who were told that as of noon on April 22, 1889, they could cross a border and claim land from the Indian Territory, but if they went sooner they would not have the right to the land. Many did go sooner, and claimed land anyway (“Me? I just got here, five seconds before you”), and the “sooners” were at first looked down on as cheaters… but soon enough their image was rehabilitated as people who were clever, and enterprising, and not going to be told what to do by some government. Now Oklahoma calls itself “The Sooner State.”

Whereas for me, the sooner state is what I’m in when I wake up sooner than my alarm, the sleep draining out of me and the dreams dribbling away like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe.” I know I’ll come around, soon enough, perhaps to the sound of a song sung by Streisand: “Soon, soon, veni veni veni…”

Well, you can’t say I go about things the wrong way. I am human, and I need my time… which is soon enough. And I hope this has come soon enough for you. Now? Now is already past as soon as you say it. It needs to be sooner than now to be now, and sooner than soon, and so on. Or how soon is now?