Lost Weekends

 Holiday weekends are always a time of paralysis by freedom. I can spend weeks suffering acutely from the apparent scarcity of time. With work hours occupying a good part of every day and a thousand other necessities crowding out the evenings, I find myself making the fullest possible use of every interstice of time. I write at improbable and inconvenient moments—lunch hours, late nights. 

I find myself sleepless at 5 am, and I seize upon this gift of unexpected wakefulness to read another 40 pages of whatever book I started earlier in the week. I am like the art historian Winckelmann as Walter Pater portrays him in a classic study—oppressed by teaching duties by day, forced to forego sleep at night in order to nourish his mind with tomes of history. 

As a result, I find I am able to accomplish a surprising amount in a compressed space of time. I look back on a week in which my days felt painfully constrained, and I see that I nonetheless—in the short intervals I had to myself—managed to read a book, write a post, do the other things I count on in life as psychic stabilizers. 

When the blessed respite of a three-day weekend appears before me, therefore—with what blissful anticipation do I regard it! If I could get so much done in a few short hours of free time—snatched from between other obstacles—just think how much I will achieve in three whole uninterrupted days of freedom! 

Dostoevsky writes in his The Idiot about the thoughts of a man condemned to death by execution. How much he must value the hours, minutes, and seconds as they expire before his scheduled end, he reflects. When he has only five minutes left, he plots out how he is going to use them as if charting a full career: "those five minutes seemed like an endless time to him, an enormous wealth." (Pevear/Volkhonsky trans.)

The author goes on to imagine what must be the thoughts of such a person if he were suddenly told that his execution had been stayed. If those last five minutes had become an eternity, what an incalculable gift of time must the complete lifetime vouchsafed to him now appear!

Such to me is the three-day weekend. It is a precious hour of reading in the middle of the night, now suddenly stretched out to a vast —almost inconceivable—expanse of 72 hours. If I read a book during a work week, then surely in these three days I will read three to five books. If I could write a blog post during a lunch hour sandwiched between two meetings, then surely over these three days I will write ten such posts. 

Then at last, the great day comes. Friday at 5 pm is here. I'm free! Eternity begins. 

But of course, because eternity lies ahead of me, there is no particular reason to start on anything now, when it might as well wait until a few hours later. We have 72 whole hours ahead of us, after all. I start on a blog post. But, I don't feel the topic I have begun is quite the best one possible. I don't have all my thoughts in order. If I wait a little longer for the thoughts to gel, the post will surely be improved. 

We reach the afternoon of the first day. Now, the specter of vanishing time is beginning to creep upon me once again. A whole precious morning is already passed, and nothing truly wonderful was commenced. And so, I decide I need to start reading one of the five books I had promised myself. I open one I had been waiting to start all week. It drags. I am second-guessing myself with every sentence. 

Is this the book that I most want to be reading at this moment? Is it the one that best matches my mood, the present historical moment? In the age we are passing through that will never come again, at this particular cross-section of my life that will never be repeated in exactly the same form, is this the one and only book I should be devoting ten or however many hours to examining? 

Inevitably, I am unsure. I put the book away and start searching for another, feeling the afternoon begin to crumble to ash in my hands. Morning and evening. The first day. 

And so it continues until—somehow, incredibly—my eternity has been exhausted. I have come down to the final day. I am in a panic. I start a blog post. I am dissatisfied with the opening sentence. It seems inadequate; it relies on a cliché, it doesn't quite make sense or seem to flow in order. Who cares! I say. Better to write something than nothing! I plunge ahead, clichés and all. 

I pick up a book. I ask myself whether it is really the right, the perfect book for our moment. Doesn't matter! I retort. Time is running out, and I refuse to be left at the end of this weekend with no book under my belt at all. I would rather read this imperfect book than have read nothing. 

And so I reach the end of the weekend and discover that I did do a few things. I started a book. I wrote a post. I watched some films. But I did all these things only in the same compressed hours that I would have taken if they were sandwiched between working days. I did them under the same sense of compulsion, seeking to wrest a few hours from the jaws of doom. 

Why could I not have used every second this productively of my blissful 72-hour eternity? Such is my search for lost time. 

Dostoevsky's protagonist, the "idiot" prince of the title, narrates the story of the condemned man to a skeptical audience. The young Aglaya asks him whether such a person, granted an unexpected pardon, really can transform his entire attitude to time so that he now appreciates every five minutes of consciousness as an inestimable gift. 

The prince replies that he knows a person who lived through exactly these circumstances, and—in truth—he must confess, the man did not retain this attitude to time and life ever afterward. Indeed, "he lost many, many minutes" after that. 

"Well, so, there's experience for you," replies a vindicated Aglaya (or maybe it's Alexandra speaking), "so it's impossible to really live 'keeping a reckoning.'" (Pevear/Volkhonsky trans.)

It may indeed be impossible to really appreciate 72 hours of total freedom as much as one hour retrieved from the crush of responsibilities—such is human nature. This is why what is needed here is something more than just the usual sermon "to the virgins, to make much of time." We need to recognize that to set oneself consciously the task of making full use of the hours given one is no help at all. 

Indeed, it may be counterproductive. It is precisely the quest to find the "full" use of time, the "best" use of the hour, that spells the procrastinator's doom. 

When we have all the time in the world, when we have absolute freedom of choice, we ask ourselves what—of the infinite options—will truly be the best one. Which book best suits me. Which post is best written. Because we could start on any of them, we find it impossible to select among them. We are like the "superfluous men" of nineteenth-century Russian literature, whom Isaiah Berlin once described as have been "offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing too many things [...] and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and go back and start down a new path, and in the end [....] achieve nothing."

By contrast, true productivity in life—and indeed, true happiness—lies in settling by force of necessity for the matter immediately at hand. Indeed, I didn't make it through Dostoevsky's 600-page The Idiot in the firm conviction in reading every paragraph that this was the one, the best paragraph I could be spending my time on. I got through them all because it was a work week, I had nothing else on my bedside table, and by sheer inertia and lack of time it seemed impossible to start on anything else. So I finished what I had begun. 

On the other hand, if the circumstances of my life were such that they did not permit me even those few hours of reading in the intervals of work, then my misery would be equally assured. 

And so we discover once again that blessedness in life is obtained neither by total freedom nor total constraint, but in some dialectic between the two—in the interplay between the individual will asserting itself against constraint. With only compulsion, the individual will that gives us meaning and selfhood is annihilated. With total freedom, we face an existential terror in which we are forced to choose, but lack any way of knowing what choice is best. 

And thus it is with so much of life, which does not consist in total victories over problems, because the solution and the problem in their purest forms so closely resemble one another—and that is why strength, and joy, and meaning, is to be found not in the triumph of one over the other, but in the struggle between them both.