What the prayers recorded in the film lay bare are depths of loneliness, self-doubt, and sadness. Each supplicant seems to be crying out for love—a love they’ve never found or a love they fear they’re on the verge of losing. Although the people in the film are of different ages and come from different backgrounds, they share two most important things: religion and nationality. What would happen if the director’s experiment were to be repeated with other groups of believers, non-Austrians, non-Catholics—would the results be the same? I think so. Watching the film, hearing the prayers, I felt like a witness to the human condition.

What is prayer and is God even listening are two questions the filmmaker wants the viewer/voyeur to chew on. Me, I left the theater thinking of the popular inspirational command: Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle.

Often attributed to Plato.

Not long after I saw the documentary, I happened to catch an interview on the radio with the filmmaker John Waters. Asked to make some movie recommendations, he immediately named Jesus, You Know. My favorite holiday movie, he called it (we were in the Christmas season). The people are maddening, John Waters said. And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.

III

I went to the gym. I have been going to the same neighborhood gym for many years. Others have been going there for at least as long as I have so I see some of the same people whenever I’m there. One person in particular I wonder about: all these years, no matter what day or what hour I go, this woman is there. Though we’ve never become friends—if we ever even exchanged names, I’ve forgotten hers—we tend to chat if we happen to be in the locker room at the same time. I remember our first conversation was about the book Infinite Jest, a copy of which she happened to have with her. When I asked her how she liked it she said that the best thing about it was its length. She would be reading the book for a long time, she said. Weeks. And she felt that, even if she didn’t love it, at least she’d be getting her money’s worth. (I could not help thinking of an all-day lollipop.) She was so tired, this woman said, of paying twenty bucks for short books—stuff that lasted only a short time, sometimes not even a weekend.

And sometimes it’s just a book of poems, she said. How can they charge that much for a book of poems? Who buys them?

Not many people, I assured her.