The hag that is currently astride me is the abject terror of wasting time. It's bad enough to have to eat and sleep. (Nabokov writes of the agony of having to abandon precious hours of consciousness every night -- a feeling shared by his insomniac creation Van-- and, to a somewhat less involved extent, by me.) One then also needs to deal with the problem of transporting oneself from place to place, none of which actively contributes to satisfying the inner obsessions.
I had a particularly acute encounter with the time-wasting demon at the start of this week, late Monday night and in the wee hours of Tuesday. Having drifted off to a too-light sleep after being overstimulated by a biography of Lucian Freud -- as one sometimes is -- I woke up hardly an hour later to the horrifying air raid siren that I eventually realized is the sound my air conditioner makes when it needs a new filter.
For some reason this experience awoke an existential dread in me that lingered even after I'd figured out how to turn the thing off. I couldn't get back to sleep.
Lying awake for hours in the middle of the night, I kept racking my brain for the source of the unrest. Somehow, one is confronted with the terrors of mortality and nothingness in a special way when one is trying to force oneself to get to sleep for work the next day and consistently failing. I felt I was regarding all of life itself, in its totality, without room for distraction. The long fleeting years stretched ahead of me. But what was bothering me about them? The length? Or the fleetingness? "O which one? is it each one? That night, that year/ Of now done darkness" (Hopkins)!
Around 3 AM I realized it was neither. What was really getting at me, the true source of angst, was my commute. I could not face another day behind the wheel in Boston traffic. I just couldn't. It was too much of a waste of time.
Not only because it took so long and was so boring, you have to understand. But because it was time during which I could not do anything else -- anything that furthered the life mission and the core obsessions (reading, writing, moralizing, fighting for justice, etc.). I'd gladly accept boredom for any length of time if it allowed other time to be stored up in a bank somewhere for other uses.
Likewise, I'd accept a commute of any length and stultification if it allowed me the free use of my hands and eyes in which to handle and examine a book or laptop. But sitting in stalled Boston/Cambridge traffic persists in being one of the few human activities I can think of in which you can actually do nothing at all, and are going nowhere at all, but in which you also cannot safely distract yourself with anything else while you're doing it. One keeps one's hands at ten and two o'clock on the steering wheel and one's eyes on the road, and lifts either at one's peril.
Granted, I do use time spent in the car in the afternoon for phone calls occasionally, and in the morning I used to comfort myself with the thought that I was at least catching up on the news on NPR. But I've gotten so lazy and have developed such a mental block about the whole journey of late that by the time I've finally gotten behind the wheel, I've always missed the best of Morning Edition and am stranded with the local news, the listing of the sponsors, and the 'later today's. Thanks to this daily helping I have learned that cystic fibrosis is a "rare, life-shortening disease" and our sponsors at Vertex are doing something about it, but little else.
So there we had it. We had identified the culprit. But what to do about it? I lay awake for another hour at least, before a plan began to form. And then, there it was, in the dim recesses. What if, against all the odds, despite the appalling distances involved, in the face of extraordinary obstacles, I walked to work?
You might be thinking that this solves nothing. In fact, it would make the trip longer. But you would be missing the point about having one's hands and eyes free. As an inveterate lifelong pacer, who finished the last third of Graham Greene's The Comedians while circling round and round his kitchen island and leaning against a domestic trash can, I have long since mastered the art of reading while walking. I may attract stares; I may pause every ten feet or so to scratch a line under the next paragraph of text (because the last paragraph seemed so important, but now this one seems so important too!); but I can eventually get myself somewhere by ambulatory locomotion while having my eyes glued to a page the majority of the time (excluding major intersections, you'll be relieved to hear).
I rushed to my computer, still in the middle of the night, and discovered that it would take me forty minutes in a straight line to get to the nearest Red Line station by foot. That was a long time and a long way, but not actually more time than I was spending behind the wheel each day to get to a more distant Red Line station. My heart was suddenly racing. This was it, then! I had cracked the code. Voy a andar!
Now I couldn't get to sleep because I was so excited. I couldn't wait to walk to work. Why wouldn't this night just end so I could give it a try?
The brilliance of the plan became even more pronounced in my mind. It began to sprout shimmering offshoots. Suppose in addition to walking while reading, which I could do on the afternoon trip home, I used the morning leg of the journey to actually jog and get some exercise? Never in my life have I been able to designate an actual time of the day to set aside for physical activity, unless absolutely forced to do so by school or college distribution requirements. But suppose my exercise was directly contributing to some other goal that I had to get done -- say, for instance, it was carrying me in the direction of work, which I would have to arrive at sooner or later anyways?
I would therefore be performing three essential functions at once -- one of which was directly related to the core obsessions. Reading, exercising, and getting to my job. The beauty of it! The clockwork precision! This was defeating the hag if anything was. The compression of different activities, the foxiness of thus outwitting time itself, overcame me. Nobody could say I was wasting time this-a-way!
I spent the rest of the night quivering with anticipation. It was like Christmas. And indeed, when I woke up, I had the same problem that I have every Christmas (no matter how much of an ostensible adult I become). After having spent the night lying awake and praying for morning to arrive sooner, and finally drifting off about an hour before the alarm, I am suddenly crushed by a dead mountain of tiredness as soon as it is actually time to awake. O dawn! O dreaded dawn! O let me rest/ Weary my veins, my brain, my life! Have pity! (Claude McKay).
Except this feeling is quickly replaced in turn by that inexplicable and quickly petering manic energy that one always seems to get on a morning after agonizingly little sleep. I spent that afternoon fighting to keep my eyes open, but I executed my morning journey to work on foot faultlessly. And I have done it again every day since, there and back. I may have been shuffling along in a strange ten step-pause motion, my body craned over a book, but I have beaten the specter of wasted time. Or at least, I have scored a few points against her in the ancient game.
The perfect thing is that the book over which I was craning on this walk, most of the week, was about precisely this problem of wasted time -- or at least, that's what I was inclined to read into it, my state being what it was. I had gotten onto Caroline Blackwood's short 1977 novel Great Granny Webster -- conveniently re-issued, like so much else of the bounty of life, in an NYRB Classics Edition -- after picking it up at the store. I shall return to the connection to wasting time momentarily.
I had gotten onto Caroline Blackwood in turn via that Lucian Freud biography I mentioned at the outset. I have a great passion -- as do many people -- for stories of tragic and disastrous artist types. Freud, compulsive gambling and philandering painter and grandson of Sigmund (funny, is there any other Freud family?), more than fit the bill.
I suppose I like hearing about these historic "hot messes" in part because: A.) I can feel that my own life is comparatively put together, for all its imperfections; and more importantly: B.) I can momentarily convince myself that if I did really implode in some horrifying way or squander my talent, this too would have a sort of romance and grandeur to it, provided I did so in the name of creative ambitions.
This is a very comforting idea in those occasional creative dry spells. It allows one to regard one's un-productivity, moodiness, and conviction of futility as itself a kind of artistic achievement. Those scenes in the beginning of Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter where the narrator goes on multiple whiskey benders and nearly loses his teaching job in the cram school have this delightful quality for me. I can reflect on the fact that I have never gone on a whiskey bender at work (or elsewhere, come to think of it), which feels good, but I can know that if I did do it some day it would be very authorly, which is also good to know. It gives one a kind of fall-back.
Anyway, Freud was married to Blackwood, and she has some funny, poison-tipped lines of correspondence quoted in this short biography ("critics say [Freud] paints the anguish of our age -- but he really paints the anguish of his sitter," e.g. -- Blackwood herself having several times modeled for the artist) that made me interested in her as a writer.
Blackwood also eventually married the poet Robert Lowell, another artistic hot mess. And Blackwood herself was rather a hot mess, who had more than a few of those whiskey benders mentioned above. And to complete the whole great circle of mutual dysfunction, Lowell famously died, after Blackwood left him, while clutching a well-known portrait of her that had been painted by none other than Lucian Freud. So it goes.
I'm sure all of these break-ups and emotional collapses and addictive behaviors must actually have been miserable to experience, and would have very little romantic allure to them if they happened in one's own life, or to people one knows. But concerning as they do the safely buried, the literary-historical, the unapproachably famous and the deeply blue-blooded, one can't help but enjoy them in the cozy way one enjoys a haunted house story or being inside during a thunderstorm. However mistakenly, one imagines that mental collapses and alcoholic binges would be a kind of fascinating adventure so long as one had genius and Yankee Puritan ancestors stretching back to J. Edwards, as Lowell did. "Thoroughbred mental cases," as he referred to himself and his fellow inmates at the exclusive McLean Hospital, in a memorable phrase. Oh, and Blackwood was a member of the aristocracy and a Guinness heiress, so she would fit this description as well.
But it is actually not the terror and temptation of scandal and self-destruction that provide the real interest of Great Granny Webster, it turns out, even if that's what drew one there -- but something almost the opposite: it is the terror and temptation of doing nothing at all! Of, in other words, wasting time, until one expires.
Of all the realms of human experience, it turns out, this is actually one of the most interesting. Which is surprising, since one would think that doing nothing would be boring, which it is. But it is fascinating to think about people surviving that degree of boredom, and for so long.
For those of us with some haunted sense of what is tiresomely, inaccurately, and self-congratulatingly referred to as the "Protestant Work Ethic" -- whatever our actual denominational or religious affiliation may be--, there is perhaps nothing in the entire world so exotic as deliberate and total idleness. The me that was awake in the small hours Tuesday morning plotting devices to shave forty minutes of non-reading time out of his day cannot imagine deliberately adding in forty minutes of blank staring and finger drumming, let alone months or years. I suspect you can't either. People of our sort -- my family's sort, e.g. -- are notorious for being incapable of enjoying time off unless they can promptly fill it with purposeful activity, even if it is purely of the absorbent kind, like taking in new information, or cataloguing data. Susan Sontag writes in On Photography that the invention of the portable camera solved the great problem of the cultural Protestant on vacation -- now one could still be doing something, even while doing nothing. One could always be taking pictures, at least, of one's rest and recreation.
Hence our fascination with the sight of real non-action, the genuine kind. It is the ultimate encounter with the Other. Quentin Crisp's memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, is all about his life as an out gay man, at a time and place when that was not easy to be; yet the most striking and memorable anecdote I can remember from reading it is also the one in which the least happens. It was the months -- or maybe years -- Crisp describes of sitting in his apartment and simply doing nothing at all. Apparently there was a long epoch of his life like this. Granted, this was easier to do in the days before smartphones, but still it comes across to me as a kind of achievement. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, one senses that this idleness is the greatest of all the minor sins the protagonist indulges, as she advances toward her pact with the devil. On her first few days in the village of "Great Mop," where she has gone to evade her family, Lolly tries to affect a kind of productive idleness. She reads books and takes walks. But she eventually gives up even on this. "Life becomes simple if one does nothing about it," observes Warner. A kind of Zen koan, if those can be droll and British.
How could one live with oneself under such circumstances? one desperately wonders. How could one simply exist without goals, ambition, action, motive force? This is the puzzle that the protagonist of Blackwood's Great Granny Webster confronts, when she meets the titular Granny in question. Great Granny Webster is an appalling and ancient Scottish matron who is, like everyone else in the novel, unforgettably described. In addition to being punctilious, scathing, close-fisted, and intent upon foisting an undesirable fourposter antique bed with easily dislodged carved pineapples upon the unfortunate young narrator (a stand-in for Blackwood herself) as her only inheritance, Granny Webster is also remarkable for her utter idleness.
It is not idleness in the sense of eschewing work for the sake of more pleasurable activities. The protagonist's Aunt Lavinia devotes herself to that goal, and as the narrator acknowledges, it provides her in itself with a kind of single-mindedness. One can have a Protestant Work Ethic about avoiding work. "Her attitude to life appeared so relentlessly frivolous that perversely she could seem to have the seriousness of someone with a sense of driving inner purpose," the narrator says.
This character's pursuit of pleasure is a kind of revulsion against Granny Webster, who is idle in a much more profound and gloomy sense of the word. "As far as I know in all her life that woman has never done anything," insists one character. She simply sits in a high-backed chair staring at the ceiling. She neither reads nor speaks at any great length, apart from the occasional complaint against the servants, and admires herself greatly for it. "I found it impossible to understand," says the narrator, "how she could take such defiant pride in the fact that she had managed to keep existing [...] without the slightest intellectual or emotional motivation, like a piece of dried-up antique brown moss that can mysteriously survive without water[.]"
Throughout the novel Granny Webster's condition of utter stasis is contrasted with what the protagonist begins to uncover about the life of her grandmother -- a woman plagued by manias, mad dashes of action, and savageries of violence. And as much as the wholly predictable former lady is distinguished from the exhaustingly unpredictable latter, by the end of the novel we have come to realize that both are simply responding to the same mad condition -- the condition of imposed boredom and idleness. They have adopted two quite different survival strategies in the face of that worst condition of the British aristocracy, the fact that they are permanently forbid to work or do anything remotely useful to other people. Utter abysses of boredom as a kind of self-imposed recompense for the benefits of unearned privilege. While the narrator's grandmother solved this problem by inventing fantasy universes to inhabit and strange fits to keep occupied, Great Granny Webster solved it by viewing the boredom as itself a kind of challenge to be mastered and endured.
Idleness thus has its own sort of asceticism. Just as accumulating wealth has its "worldly asceticism," if we are still to trust Weber, and giving it all away has its spiritual asceticism. There is a character, Bouba, in Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière's first novel, whose chief occupation throughout the book is sitting on a large couch, occasionally eating heads of lettuce, quoting the Koran and reading Freud (Sigmund, this time -- not Lucian). For this he is regarded as a kind of sage. "Bouba the Guru." The narrator of Laferrière's book is writing a book very much like the book in which he appears, and he tells Bouba that he has found a place for him in its pages. "I like the idea of the guy who doesn't do fuck-all," Bouba says, when he hears a description of the plot. "Of course you do, you're my model," replies the narrator. (Homel trans.) Bouba eventually attracts disciples and lovers by doing nothing more than sitting on his couch. "Wouldn't you know it: to get the most beautiful girl at McGill, you have to stay at home and do nothing. Cruising in place," as the narrator describes it.
All of which raises the question that is perhaps truly at the root of the cultural Protestant's fascination with non-action: the great question of what is the point? Is there in fact something gained by one's effort and striving, or might one just as well have done nothing? Is that extra forty minutes shaved off the morning drive worth something, in the ultimate sense? Is there anything less valuable about the Bouba and Webster approach to life than any other? "Meanwhile, what am I for?" ponders Alasdair Gray at the beginning of his collection of autobiographical essays, Of Me and Others, contemplating the remainder of his life in which -- so he says -- he intends not to write another major work. "What does this ordinary-looking, eccentric-sounding, obviously past-his-best person exist to do apart from eat, drink, publicize himself, get fatter, older and die? Stars, herbs and cattle exist without reasons, they fit the universe wherever they occur without need of language to maintain their forms[...]"
Implicit in the passage is the question: might one not after all "exist without reasons"? Might that not be okay? Might one not go ahead and waste some time -- or rather, recognize that no time is truly wasted, or perhaps all is wasted, for one activity is as good as another?
This is simply the question of whether existence is better than non-existence, since everything that is, is action, is motion. In an Einsteinian universe, the cessation of all motion would mean the cessation of time. This is why the attempt to imagine blissful states of being that would be essentially static always fail. Such a state would have to be incompatible with continued existence. It would persist in a sort of absolute zero. We'd have to cease to be, as the price for admission to such an unchanging paradise. As the philosopher Nicias says in Anatole France's Thaïs, "In my opinion perfection costs too dear; we pay for it with all our being, and to possess it must cease to exist." (Douglas trans.) At least in this universe.
This is why all life is to be found in action. This is why the purpose of life is to be retrieved by placing infinite goals in front of oneself and moving steadily in their direction. This is why, as the character Alissa says in André Gide's Strait is the Gate, "I ask myself now whether it is really happiness I desire, so much as the progress toward happiness." (Bussy trans.) (Now, you wanna talk about Protestant Ethic, talk about Gide! Alissa eventually denies happiness to the unfortunate protagonist of Gide's novella, even though she loves him, because she fears he will rest content with worldly happiness as a result of it and cease his spiritual strivings ever upward. Gide, of Protestant extraction and underlying orientation, is said to have modeled the book on his own tormented relationship with his eminently culturally Calvinist wife.)
But suppose one says no. Suppose one decides that to say action is essential to life is no point in action's favor. Suppose one favors the position of non-existence, and thinks the world would have been better off if life had never come into it at all.
It is a sentiment that is potent for capturing a certain mood in art and poetry -- thinking here of Wilfred Owen's Was it for this the clay grew tall? / —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/ To break earth's sleep at all? ("Futility"). But it is not good philosophy. For any standard of "better" is derived from conditions we know from within existence itself, within the context of life and consciousness. The universe would not be "better off" without conscious thought. It wouldn't be aware of itself in that circumstance. It wouldn't feel anything, much less better or worse than otherwise. Existence -- hence action -- is a condition, a starting assumption, for anything we can debate together.
But what about Granny Webster and Bouba, then? Do they not pose a challenge to this theory? No, for as we have already seen, both are in fact still doing something. The one is mastering boredom by degrees. The other is "cruising in place." Both pursue their goals.
But then we are back where we started. If both idle people and busy people are still acting, in some sense -- still pursuing some purpose -- what difference does it make which purpose it is? Why not be Great Granny Webster in her chair?
Because one can choose to derive one's purpose and meaning from the defense and promotion of that which makes all meaning and purpose possible in the first place -- which is, as we have seen, conscious existence, life itself. One can single-mindedly devote oneself to the protection and well-being of human life, the human community.
I haven't gotten there yet in my own life, to be honest. Most of my goals are still fairly egocentric. Reading more books. Wasting less time. Getting more exercise. But perhaps that condition is only temporary. Perhaps as I conquer the time-wasting demon, the next one to take its place in the relay will be the demon of Ultimate Meaning and Purpose -- which can only mean the Meaning and Purpose which is organized around making Meaning and Purpose possible in the first place, by promoting the maintenance and flourishing of consciousness.
Perhaps the next demon will wake me in the middle of the night, just hours before I have to get up and go to work, and whisper in my ear: So What Have You Done Lately for Life?
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