''THE NATION is stalled in unprecedented doubt'' is the way Laurence Tribe put it in the Times the other day. Commenting on the stock market slide, Jon Burnham, a mutual fund manager, said, ''Every day the uncertainty goes on it gets worse. This country is not used to having no outcome.'' The new Time magazine simply calls it ''Standoff.''
For nearly a week the pundits have been stretching the language to describe the bizarre state in which the nation finds itself. Yet to me the most eloquent expression, because the simplest, was given by none other than the Republican candidate. Meeting with reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Governor Bush said, ''We're all in limbo.''
Medieval theologians invented the idea of limbo to define the fate of the unbaptized dead who did not deserve to go to hell, but who, still stained with Original Sin, could not enter heaven. Limbo is neither misery nor happiness, but something in between. Stasis, standoff, uncertainty forever.
Limbo comes from the Latin word for border and, conceived spatially, it is a place neither here nor there, a realm of permanent marginality. But the horror of limbo becomes even more palpable when we conceive it temporally, as a time when the normal flow of cause and effect is interrupted, calling into question the most basic way we impose order on the chaos of our existence.
Limbo, in time, is to have left one trapeze before the other is anywhere in sight.
The presidential election cycle is not just an exercise in choosing leaders. It is the central narrative structure of the American mind, which is why presidential historians have become our national gurus.
By relating the story of the presidents, from George Washington on, we bring each generation - and every immigrant - into the past, present, and future of this country. Every story, as we learned in high school, has a beginning, middle, and end, with conflicts resolved in an outcome, an epiphany in which meaning becomes evident.
The American story is told as a sequence of presidential episodes, and we are each able to become part of it and to renew our relationship to it by enacting that sequence every four years. By voting, we each become the story teller.
Limbo is the opposite of such narrative coherence. In limbo, we are left to wonder if the story holds together. We wonder, that is, if choice leads to consequence; if conflicts can be resolved; if order can be drawn from chaos. In limbo, the present is held hostage to a future that never comes.
The actualities of the United States are such that, through the work of election officials and judges and, perhaps, the candidates themselves, the crisis of this stalled election will be overcome, but not before we will have learned something from our time in limbo, when for a moment the myth of American exceptionalism broke.
The limbo of uncertain outcomes and interrupted expectations, in fact, is not the rarity to most of the earth's population that it is to this country. We are accustomed to thinking of our cars and computers as the luxuries that set us apart from the world's impoverished people, but the very construct of narrative order embedded both in our idea of story and in our election cycle - conflict leads to crisis leads to resolution - is itself a luxury.
We are upset because for a week or two we don't have that narrative order, but most humans don't have it ever. Limbo, or life on the margin of time, is an exact definition of what it is to live in Africa with HIV and AIDS, in Ukraine with a crumbling economy, in Bangladesh awaiting the next flood, in Jerusalem with peace fading like a desert mirage, or, for that matter, in an American prison with no parole.
Limbo, the Oxford English Dictionary says, ''is the condition of neglect or oblivion to which persons or things are consigned when regarded as outworn, useless, or absurd.''
Something deeply absurd in the American soul has been laid bare this week. Instead of urgently pulling up the blanket of our exceptionalism, we should face the fact, for a moment, that we too are prisoners of the human condition. Flawed, fallible, foolish, afraid. Meaning eludes us, and a proper resolution can seem impossible. We are at the mercy of a future that will not show itself on schedule.
If we Americans could learn from this interruption in our national narrative that we are like humans everywhere, perhaps we would be less callous in consigning those same humans to the limbo of our neglect.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
