One Friday evening at BAM this past summer, roughly twelve minutes into Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s four-and-a-half-hour-long avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, “Einstein on the Beach,” a man sitting a row ahead of me stole a glance at his watch. It seemed an eloquent gesture. Not as a verdict on the show—which has been rightly hailed and heralded across the world—but as a vignette of our contemporary busyness. Nowadays, encounters of the spirit must be scheduled long in advance, and even then the endless tide of deferred chores and anticipated engagements never ceases to break on our attention. There is always something else that needs doing.