Doing Nought

 I found myself with some time off work this past week, and since geographic location has become irrelevant to my job in the age of Zoom, I decided to light out for Florida and spend a month or so with my parents. Thanks to COVID, flying was not an option, but no matter: I had plenty of time to spread out a multi-day socially-distanced road trip. I therefore evolved the following scheme for how to do a 21-hour drive in a relatively civilized manner. I would make the journey over four days, stopping in a (suddenly cheap) hotel each afternoon. I would listen to audiobooks in the car, read a novel into the night, and otherwise make full and pleasant use of my vacation days. 

The reality was something different. I had not fully taken into account what it would mean to perform this odyssey in the midst of a pandemic. To be sure, I was in a mask and hand-washing the whole time. The hotels seemed relatively deserted. But that did not prevent my paranoia from running away with me. Sitting up late nights and early mornings obsessively scanning every inch of my inner state for possible signs of COVID was as much fun as it sounds. I therefore hit upon a different plan, after keeping two days to my original hotel schedule. Instead of spending two more days on the road, I would just make a 12-hour-long bee-line for Sarasota. 

Success met this endeavor, so far as it went. I got home safely. But I had to compromise my original vision. 12 hours straight was simply too long to listen to an audiobook; I didn't have enough podcasts to fill up that much time; and there would obviously be no room in the evening for reading, with that schedule. As a result, I realized that a sacrifice was necessary—for the sake of avoiding a dread disease and risk spreading it to others. For the latter half of the day's drive, I would have to turn on the radio, flip to a music station, and let my mind melt into formless jelly. 

This feels to me like a concession—even a defeat. The original point of spending vacation days on driving was that I could make the experience productive—through the aforementioned regime of listening and reading. I might be spending hours each day behind the wheel, but at least I'd be learning something—thus being productive. This need for every possible hour to be spent in some kind of educational endeavor is drilled deep into my conscience and is obviously a cultural phenomenon that extends beyond me. 

A friend shared with me a New York Times piece about the way podcast listening meets our need to feel that we are fully utilizing every possible second—that a minute or hour has not permanently been lost to mindless drudgery when we need to do the dishes or laundry, but that we can salvage it by auditory multitasking. I recall as well a passage from Wallace Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety, in which one of his four leading characters finds himself trapped during a road trip with unexpected time on his hands, and immediately begins reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. He is, observes Stegner's narrator, "[a]ccustomed to making every hour count."

To realize that I had reached the outer limit of my ability to concentrate, therefore, and that I would have to give the next six hours of driving over to tuning the radio every couple of minutes in search of tolerable songs was therefore a bitter pill. The only way to content myself was to point out the various things I was learning through this directionless channel surfing. I learned, for instance, that Bon Jovi has a terrible but exceptionally well-meaning song out about COVID-19—featuring such topical, cringey, yet undeniably good-natured lyrics as: "Although I'll keep my social distance/ What this world needs is a hug."

I also learned that evangelical radio preachers think virulent antisemitism is okay so long as it comes under the banner of "Messianic Judaism." I learned that, no matter what part of the country you are in, you can reliably expect to find a station playing "Edge of Seventeen." Which is a good song and all. But it does strike me as outrageous on a deep level that—with the hundreds of hit songs making up the canon of "Classic Rock"—I nonetheless heard "We are the Champions" on two different stations within five minutes of each other. Same with "Livin' on a Prayer," which also reminds us that Bon Jovi's social conscience was just as broadly right-minded yet annoying long before we had a pandemic on our hands. 

I cling to these odds and ends of cultural lore that entered my awareness during the six hours of driving because they are the only evidence I can appeal to that this time I spent away from the news, away from edifying literature, etc., was not a complete waste. I was still picking up some information. In that sense, I was not committing the ultimate sin of doing nothing. Of course, one could take the opposite tack. One could try to acquit oneself of the charge by denying its validity. One could say that doing nothing is fine—that is is just as valid as doing something, in fact, if not superior. 

There is a whole school of thought cropping up that attempts to do just this. An op-ed in the New York Times appeared last year that was titled simply "The Case for Doing Nothing." The argument appears to be that doing nothing is good for you; indeed, it makes you more productive. In which case, it is justified by its contribution to doing something, and can therefore be seen as a form of productivity. In which case, the circle is complete. We can relax again. By doing nothing, we are crossing another item off the list. We have achieved something with our time. 

This spurious logic is not quite enough to chase away the demon of my Protestant or Victorian conscience, however, or whatever it is within me that warns against the lateness of the hour—the fear that whispers (as a sun-dial slogan puts it that is mentioned in the podcast S-Town) "You have done nothing good today." I recently found out what that voice sounds like. I was reading a collection of Pre-Raphaelite poetry (now there was a conscience-salving use of an hour, I tell you!), and I discovered the following in a poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti ("Soothsay"). It is a commandment that I take to be the final word on the New York Times op-ed, and its whole line of thinking:

Unto the man of yearning thought 

And aspiration, to do nought 

Is in itself almost an act,— 

Being chasm-fire and cataract 

Of the soul's utter depths unseal'd. 

Yet woe to thee if once thou yield 

Unto the act of doing nought!

How callous seems beyond revoke

The clock with its last listless stroke!

How much too late at length!—to trace

The hour on its forewarning face,

The thing thou hast not dared to do!…

Behold, this may be thus! Ere true

It prove, arise and bear thy yoke.