Book by Book (5 page)

When nothing matters but to realize their vision, writers and artists often tend to become such dynamos of intensely focused energy. Stendhal produced
La Chartreuse de Panne
, a peak of French fiction, in just fifty-three days; the perfectionist Gustave Flaubert would worry his sentences day after day, spending hours deciding whether to use a comma or a semicolon; Marcel Proust hardly left his cork-lined room once he'd plunged into his “search for lost time.” Some imaginations only seem to kick in when their possessors bring to bear almost supernal fervor. An awed interviewer once exclaimed to the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, “You do amazing things on the saxophone, Mr. Parker.” The musician replied, “I don't know about amazing—I practiced for fifteen hours a day for a few years.” Centuries earlier Michelangelo complained that people wouldn't be so astonished at his sculpture if they knew how hard he'd had to labor to achieve his mastery.

The point is: You generally can't wait for inspiration, so just get on with the work. Discplined, regular effort will elicit inspiration, no matter what your field.

Anthony Trollope didn't write quite as much as Balzac, but he was hardly a slouch, producing nearly fifty novels, and mostly thick Victorian novels at that. For Trollope a writer is a man (or woman) who makes his way to a desk each morning and . . . writes. Before heading off to his regular, full-time job as an administrator for the British postal system, Trollope awoke at 5:30, day after day, drank a cup of coffee, and sat down before a quire of paper, pen in hand:

All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then, he should have so trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours—so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom ... to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour.

So nearly every twenty-four hours—even when traveling (to Egypt, the West Indies, Australia)—Trollope produced on average 3,000 words.

Before beginning a project, he prepared a diary in which he calculated the number of weeks the book would require, then each
day he entered the number of pages written. With this system, he explained, “if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied.” Trollope was that admirable and rare phenomenon, an absolute professional. “In the bargain I have made with publishers ... I have prided myself on completing my work exactly within the proposed dimensions. But I have prided myself especially on completing it within the proposed time,— and I have always done so.”

W. H. Auden said that a poet must keep hidden his passion for his shop, Evelyn Waugh that even revision and the correcting of publisher's proofs must be done
con amove.
The flamboyant genius Colette adopted as her writing motto
“La règie guérit tout”—
discipline cures everything. Find the right work, these great artists remind us, the work you should be doing, and you will have largely solved the key question of how to spend your life.

This doesn't mean you will be happy all the time. But the work will become an inner citadel to which you can retreat during times of crisis, as well as a reliable rampart from which to face the world and misfortune. As the historian R. H. Tawney once wrote, “If a man has important work to do, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.” Yet almost any work can be important. With an admiration bordering on envy, the contemporary poet Philip Levine used to observe a clothes presser in a Detroit tailor's shop: “I read in his movements not a disregard for this work but, rather, the affirmation that all work
was worth doing with elegance and precision and that necessary work granted dignity to the worker. For me he was both a pants presser and the most truly dignified person I'd ever met, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Levine's words call to mind the classical imperative: “Do what you are doing.” That is, whether you are preparing dinner or playing tennis or tuning a car's engine or sweeping a room, really focus your whole self on just that. Do it well, and you can invest even the most trivial activities with significance, transforming the mundane into the spiritual.

The best book ever written about the relationship between work and leisure remains
Walden
, by Henry David Thoreau. (If you've never read it, read it now.) Its opening chapters and its conclusion, in particular, remind us that what matters in life is to become who we are, and that the only failure is to shrink from this duty and follow instead the dictates of family, society, or religion.

Thoreau writes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, so that when I came to die I would not discover that I had not lived.” That last clause indicates the cost of refusing to acknowledge what one is. Too many people, Thoreau was convinced, allow their lives to be used up in the pursuit of needless wealth and social status; hence his advocacy of simplicity and his advice to keep wants to a minimum. Throughout
Walden
Thoreau persistently asks us to think
about a single question: What really matters? Our answer determines how we live, how well we spend those days and nights given to each of us alone. As he reminds us in a famous sentence: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to that music which he hears, no matter how measured or far away.”

The ancients believed that leisure was, in the words of the modern philosopher Josef Pieper, “the basis of culture.”
Otium
—the Latin for leisure—was essential not only to philosophic inquiry and spiritual receptivity, but also to artistic creativity. Over the centuries writers have regularly written “In Praise of Idleness” (as Robert Louis Stevenson titled one of his best essays). Without periods of downtime, or daydreaming, we find ourselves growing dull, mechanical, enslaved to a routine. We need what Italians call
il dolcefar niente
—the pleasure of doing nothing.

Our inner lives are, after all, remarkably wasteful. To come up with a good idea, whether for a building or a poem, a garden or a new hairstyle, requires the mind to explore its options, try out notions, and allow the subconscious to gradually perform its magic. Eventually, there may be a “Eureka” moment, when the scales drop from the eyes and a course of action grows clear. More often, we may simply come up against a deadline and need to start producing.

Nonetheless, during these seemingly fallow periods, which to the world can resemble mere daydreaming, real work
is being done. Don't many of us regularly find our best ideas while soaking in the bathtub (like Archimedes when he cried out that first “Eureka!”) or as we drift off to sleep or linger in the pleasant half-awakened lethargy of morning? In these places, at these times, our roiling, restless consciousness is finally quiet, and so schemes and fancies can rise to the surface. Rudyard Kipling believed his own unconscious imagination was guided by his “Daemon,” a term taken from the Greek for a personal genius or guardian. Before embarking on a writing project, said Kipling, he sometimes needed to allow his Daemon to perform its secret magic; he needed to “wait, drift and obey.”

The function of leisure is essentially to liberate us from too much consciousness. (As Dostoyevsky's Underground Man announced, “Too much consciousness is a disease, a positive disease.”) Periodically, we need to break away from the ego's relentless monitoring, forget our packed daily calendars, shake off what the poet Charles Baudelaire described as
“Vhorrible fardeau du temps”
—the horrible burden of time—or what we might now call time pressure. Prayer, meditation, fantasy, intoxication, free association, psychoanalysis, daydreaming, play—all these are techniques for entering a realm of being other than the quotidian, tapping into our inner self, touching something dark and ecstatic in our essence. By doing this regularly, we salve not only our troubled spirits but also our imaginations. “To do good work a man should be industrious,” said the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, but “to do great work he must certainly be idle as well.”

Much of the time we may be satisfied with quiet philosophic leisure: the even, peaceful tenor of days spent gardening or
angling like Izaak Walton or in quiet conversation with friends. Is there a better glimpse of human contentment than the dialogues of Plato or the gently humorous conversation novels—
Crotchet Castle, Gryll Grange
—of Thomas Love Peacock? But sometimes such modest, genteel idleness isn't quite enough.

In C. G. Jung's psychology we only injure our fundamental being by denying the dark and sometimes cruel side of us called the shadow. Nietzsche described the interdependence of the Apollonian (or rational) and the Dionysian (or ecstatic) in ancient Greek civilization. Each of us needs the periodic emotional release of carnival, and so festivals of silliness and excess like Mardi Gras, the Feast of Fools, and the World Turned Upside Down are common to virtually all cultures.

Tension and release, focused work and unfocused relaxation. People, it seems, are locked into binary systems: Too much tension leads to stress, then breakdown, while nothing but idleness makes us soft, lethargic, and swinish. “Why should life all labor be?” sing Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters, before sinking into torpor and lassitude.

The ideal is to embrace our polarities, to choose not a bland, colorless existence, but one where the full spectrum of our personalities, the dark as well as the light, is given its due. Aristotle based his ethics on choosing the mean between two extremes, just as his teacher Plato insisted that a life devoted solely to pleasure would be as incomplete as one given over entirely to wisdom. Only the mixed life is a complete and fulfilled life. Any of us might argue with Plato and even disagree with Aristotle, but it's hard to contend with both.

When we consider the ways we might spend our leisure hours— daydreaming, watching sports on TV, surfing the Net, traveling, going to the movies—we shouldn't overlook or neglect hobbies and pets. To build model airplanes, take care of a dog or tank of tropical fish, play serious chess, throw pots, cook new recipes, keep up a scrapbook or a correspondence—all these are active uses of our imagination and yet refresh us because they are seldom the source of our salaries. An amateur, after all, is simply one who loves.

And of all pastimes, those involving us with nature feel especially restorative and right for our souls. The English don Basil Willey movingly wrote: “Solitude, silence, the admonishing presence of grand, fair and permanent forms, and the gentler allurements of pure air, flowers and clear streams—these are amongst the best things we have in this imperfect world; they are valuable in themselves.” The bird-watcher who gazes at the majesty of a blue heron skimming along a southern river or the gardener in the early morning weeding among her raised beds of vegetables, the hiker on the Appalachian Trail or the snorkeler in the Caribbean, all these receive the blessing of a mood in which, as Wordsworth said, “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.”

Not everyone may respond quite so strongly as Wordsworth to the woods and its wonders, but it behooves each of us to find a similar refuge in our lives, whether it be as a gym rat or an amateur
actor, a book collector or a weekend chef. Such activities as these can grant us a peace that passeth understanding.

Some people try for a clear demarcation between work and leisure. They ride the train to the office or drive to the assembly plant; for eight hours or so, they make phone calls or widgets— and what exactly are widgets?—and then they wearily come home, pull on some jeans, spend the evening in front of the big-screen television or out in the garden, pottering with the heliotropes. After a few hours, they climb the stairs to bed, and the next morning the same process begins again.

Many men and women need the clarity of this austere division: work in this pigeonhole, recreation in that one. But in the world of telecommunications and home offices, it makes sense, when possible, to combine the professional and the personal or, at least, to make easier the transition between the two. To start, one can transform the Danish functional look of traditional business life into something a bit more playful, more reflective of the unique self.

Consider, for example, the place where you actually work.

Freud loaded the top of his desk with figurines, small sculptures, and primitive fetishes, leaving hardly any room for a pencil and pad of paper. Colette kept a collection of snowglobes around her worktable. Even the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht liked to have a toy donkey near his writing area, with a bobbing head and a little sign: “I too must understand it.” After all, if you're going
to spend hours of your life, day after day, year after year, doing something, why not like where you do it?

Pinned to a bulletin board above where I usually write is an index card inscribed with a depressing quote from Henry James: “The practice of ‘reviewing' has nothing in common with the art of criticism.” To the right of this card, and perhaps even more disheartening, is a photocopy of “How to Convert a RoadRunner Document to Quark-Readable Format.” (Such, my friends, is modern journalism.) Here too is an advertising flyer for a memoir about dogsledding:
My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian.
Then a photograph of a bombed-out London library. Next to it another scrap of paper, this one sporting a quotation from Jack Green, an early champion of the novelist William Gaddis: “Recognizing masterpieces is the job of the critic, not writing competent reviews of the unimportant.”