The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  She hits the call button. I’m given a glass of water. “Drink.” Breathe, drink, live to see another day. Live to tell the tale.

  “Better?” the nurse says pleasantly after the water is gone. A pat on the leg. “Better?”

  Not really. Not dying, but not better. My husband is thanking her profusely. He’s holding my hand. I allow this, my cold meat patty in his beautiful warm, dry hand. His beautiful hand I’ve always loved. I love it again, which is a sign I’m not dying. The nurse has turned back to the window, enjoying the bed of pillowy clouds we rest upon.

  * * *

  —

  That was ten years ago. It took almost two weeks before I could breathe unconsciously again. For days I took deep greedy intakes of air, full of gratitude, but not entirely persuaded. Some inner monitor kept checking—yes, breathing, still breathing. I had struggled mightily with a fierce angel. A muscular dark devil. True, he had won, but I had been spared, left heaving on the roadside where we had contended, left to resume my fate.

  A panic attack? But there had been no panic, not even a tingle of apprehension. I went from life to death—not what I “thought” or imagined was death, but the absolute sensation of extinction—without a signal, as if I’d been hit from behind by a Mack truck as I walked down a perfectly ordinary street. Mugged by death.

  How I slept those weeks afterward. A slumberous swoon in the afternoon (I who was never a napper), and all night long, dreamless, content. I felt profoundly convalescent. It was heavenly. I yawned a lot, huge, openmouthed yawns. I couldn’t yawn enough. I was tireless in my yawning.

  I had not rested like this since . . . out of the deep folds of childhood, the beechnut tree wagged its scissored leaves above me, and faded away again.

  Nor was this the only time I suffered a panic attack. The others (three) occurred on terra firma, not presenting themselves as death but as brainlessness.

  Each time I thought I’d had a stroke. Again, no emotion, no awareness of “stress” or worry. Just suddenly, a closing down of the lower functions—or are they the higher functions? Specifically, I realized I didn’t know what year it was. I was out of time, out of mind. Time itself was gone, had no meaning. Other scraps of basic info were missing, and a light mantle of oddity rested upon me, a rustling tissue of thin taffeta in place of what usually passed for my mind. I lost names, other dates, including my birthday (I clawed my way to that after a few moments), but it was the oddity that claimed me and defined the experience. Timelessness, airiness, self as a thinning, drifting cirrus cloud.

  That’s the best I can do—to call it oddity. Like a mystic who cannot describe transfiguration, I’m unable to capture this sensation of the loss of my mind—if that’s what I had lost. I wasn’t seizing the moment—the moment had seized me.

  Of course I went to the ER. Tests, MRI, the questions (I did know who the president was and was proud of it, but I still didn’t know the year). A pill was administered. It will calm you. I didn’t feel uncalm. I felt . . . odd. Do you have an oddity pill?

  Aside from sensing I really ought to know the year, it was not unpleasant. In fact, it was lovely as long as I didn’t care about knowing the year and various other pieces of basic intel usually packed into the kit bag of my busybee mind.

  The ER doctor came into my cubicle after the tests and labs.

  “You’ve had a panic attack.”

  Oh, that.

  “You’re fine.”

  I threw into the wastebasket the prescription he gave me. The very idea of pills made me anxious, the only “stress” I experienced from my dive into the deep lake of oddity.

  And again I slept. And slept. And was restored to myself in due course, trailing the tatters of some lost ease, that filmy taffeta oddity, the consolation prize, apparently, of being rattled out of myself, a blip on the flashing screen of adulthood. I’d “come back” from that other life, the one under the beechnut where my mind first appeared to me as a drifting cloud. After all these years, still a Daydream Believer—that Monkees’ bubblegum song of my girlhood. Still crazy after all these responsible years. Still looking for bliss in nothing at all, the cloudy mind moving over existence, outside time.

  And then returned to what I thought of as my life.

  * * *

  And what is that—“my life”? Fifty years—more—and “the life of the mind,” lolling under the beechnut, has long since morphed into a scrum of tasks jittering down the day.

  Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem. I sense I’m not alone. Fretful, earnest, ambitious strivers—we take no comfort in existence unfurling easefully as God intended (my mother speaking, a middling midwesterner who knew how to let things unfold without rush, her head wreathed with vagueness, the smoke of her cig circling upward).

  For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished. On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done. It explains—and solves—nothing to call this workaholism.

  Whatever happened to that Roman concept, first encountered in Intermediate Latin—otium cum dignitate, honorable leisure? The peace that passeth understanding that the classical world held as its ideal, the ease I’d touched under the beechnut tree, not knowing it would disappear, fade, elude me when the time came to stop throwing myself on the grass and looking up at the passing clouds. Never mind the necessity of a slave class to keep the otium basking on the secluded hillside villa portico under its shaded grape arbor. Still, where is the ideal at least, if not the way of life?

  And what about Montaigne in his tower, retiring from public life to muse about how to die—or was it how to live? Whichever. Put that on the list: Read Montaigne.

  So many books I keep meaning to read. I move the titles from one to-do list to another. I don’t bother listing Proust anymore. I’ve read the opening pages about the madeleine cookie soaked in linden flower tea so many times, I’ve come to think of In Search of Lost Time as a short lyric. I get the picture, if not the story. I have time for vignettes, but not for narrative arcs. I start a novel, but keep breaking off to check my iPhone. I-Phone indeed—the busyness of me myself and I.

  I’ve already read enough Montaigne (I’ve even taught him—The Art of the Personal Essay, Eng 5610) to know I’d like to waste my life the way he did, taking up one conundrum after another, plucked out of idiosyncratic curiosity, how he wrote his way around a subject for a while, dropped it, picked up another—On Cannibals, On Experience, on this, on that.

  He called them essays, but he didn’t mean a freshman theme. He used the word to show he wasn’t a professional literary man, that he was just tossing off unbidden thoughts for his own interest. Accidentally, he invented a literary genre. The one I practice.

  Yet, even before the essays, before my “work,” I keep composing to-do lists. My most recent:

  Return overdue books

  Mammo appt

  Mustard, garlic, milk (skim), bananas

  Date of Thanksgiving this year?

  Letters of rec: Greg, Jeff, Susan . . . who else???

  Blurbs (3—actually read the books to the end)

  Flowers to GK (mother’s death—or was it father . . . ask Ellen)

  Ants in kitchen. Traps? Poison? Hardware store?

  Fish oil (helps against aging—Sue)

  Overcoats to Goodwill

  Czech phrase book for G (leaves Monday)

  Memoir ms. from Montreal paralytic (bottom right pile)—READ/RESPOND

  Furnace inspection (ticking sound)

  Rose wilt (ask Joan? Judith?)

  Check to Refugee Sanctuary (how much?)

  Geraniums and sprengeri fern for the graves

  Deadline

  Dentist

  Dish soap

  Dog food

  This organization (or att
empt at organization) is meant to sweep away all the dumb tasks of the day so that Real Life can be lived. Real Life? What comes after dog food?

  Onward to the night, which is to say insomnia, cell phone on the bedside table, the mind drilling away with yet more frantic interior list-making. Don’t forget! Remember to . . . Have you . . . Did you . . . ?

  Whole decades can go this way—and have—not just in domestic detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and success, responsibility and reward. My work, as I say with foolish vanity. Deadlines piled upon deadlines. That devilishly apt word deadline, the heart seizing as if shot, hands wringing for a reprieve—a week, a day? But delivering. Always delivering. You can count on me. That, in fact, is the problem. I never learned to follow Nancy Reagan’s one piece of good advice: Just Say No.

  Even with the arch refusal to friend anybody or to tweet abstemiously in 140 characters from the baroque song sheet of my jammed mind, even so, the daydream life, that prairie of possibility cherished from childhood, and beyond that into my delicious time-wasting youth—all that has been junked up with . . . with what? Reality? Life as it really is and must be for an adult?

  Wasn’t it Fitzgerald, St. Paul boy, first literary hero, who said bitterly toward the end of his life that “the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness”? By turns rhapsodic and vexed, he was more profoundly American in his ambition and his romance for the country—those boats against the current, the dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night—than he-man Hemingway with his fishing and hunting, his safaris and wars.

  Eventually, Fitzgerald was fed up with striving, with what he called “the bitch goddess of success.” In the depths of the Depression (his own and America’s) he wrote his “Crack-Up” essays when he couldn’t bear the effort anymore—“my limitless capacity for toil.” Another deadline-beset soul.

  Another lifelong list-maker. He made his tragic hero into one too, the notebook found after poor George Wilson has shot Gatsby in his pool. The boyhood ambition outlined in his rigorous to-do list proves that Jimmy Gatz, a.k.a. Jay Gatsby, is the ultimate tragic American hero not because he was ruinously ambitious and something of a crook, but because he was an ardent self-improver:

  Rise from bed . . . . . 6 a.m.

  Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling . . . . . 6:15–6:30

  Study electricity etc . . . . . 7:15–8:15

  Work . . . . . 8:30–4:40 p.m.

  Baseball and sports . . . . . 4:30–5:00

  Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it . . . . . 5:00–6:00

  Study needed inventions . . . . . 7:00–8:00

  General Resolves: No wasting time at Shafters . . . . . No more smoking or chewing Bath every other day Read one improving book or magazine per week Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week Be better to parents

  Jimmy Gatz followed a long lineage from that original American list-maker, Ben Franklin, whose Autobiography lays out the day like a time card to be punched, his list of improvements and self-creating instructions a handmade noose he fitted around his own neck, dragging his life forward, always forward. Or upward.

  This list-making of a self-improving sort is an American heritage from Franklin to Fitzgerald to us, the urgent organization of the day in the service of bettering oneself. Nothing like the cloudy drifting under the beechnut that still beckons (or haunts) after all these years. Up in the air, flying, higher, higher, dying into a panic attack. Up, up (Fitzgerald’s first word, I read somewhere, was Up, inscribed by his mother in his baby book), the American urgency for uplift. Or that four-bit word—transcendence.

  * * *

  —

  Reprimand to self: you dare to complain about a life rich in tasks and duties and pleasures—rich with meaning? Daily life, work you chose and profess to love, domestic detail, the call and reply of other people’s lives, the beloveds mixed in there with everybody else who has a claim on you, the sheer wants and requests, always heard as demands, the gnats of need buzzing. Deadlines. Delivering. Always.

  Not to mention the weights of the past, hanging like bells gonging from your wrists. Memory is a tough boss, a micromanager sending too many memos. Even the realization, still coming as a surprise: the shock of how happy you were in love, for years, how long you were given to have and to hold. Even though he’s gone now, the bell of memory. The beautiful hand holding yours. Dust now.

  We’ll get to that.

  And the flip side of memory, the sharp tableaux of error or unkindness, embarrassment, missed chances—the troubles I doled out surprisingly more unbearable than the wounds absorbed from others. The grinding gears of the private newsreel, flickering anxiously in the dark night when a person should be unconscious, dreaming, not thinking. The scars of old heartbreaks that seared you, gave you a depth charge. Even they have value, a “fortunate fall” as every English major learns in the required Milton course.

  And the main event—work, the years of writing, reading, editing, teaching, the focus on projects, book after book, assignment after assignment, the fact of having done, more or less, what you set out to do. Clawing your way from project to project, not thinking of it as clawing. Thinking of it as “my work.” You sought the deadlines—they weren’t coerced. You who come from people who were servants to “the rich,” that aggrieved Fitzgerald term. The first generation in your line to go to college. Allowed to rise and shine.

  You’re complaining? It’s called a full life. A good life. A lucky life. The friends it has brought, wild humor, some bright lights, charms and delights, long nights, early mornings, invitations, travel. Lucky you, as I keep saying.

  Still, the sense of life being littered rather than lived.

  Nor am I alone in this nostalgia for the lost nothing-moment that turns out to be—well, everything. The crucible of consciousness. The lovely wasteful vagary of the mind. Virginia Woolf tried to capture it:

  If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.

  Even she gives up: “I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written, in order to give the feeling which is even at this moment very strong in me. But I should fail (unless I had some wonderful luck).”

  She is describing something so essentially offhand, so without narrative value, that nothing can be made of it. A gold so frail that it cannot be annealed into anything. It’s gold, all right, but such an airborne mote of gold, it can never be fashioned. Still, it glimmers, haunts, beckons.

  It’s taken for dross. Waste. Yet in the end (and at the beginning—childhood) this glimmery bit is the only thing of value we possess. Its weight cannot be measured. It can never be lost or traded away. It’s just . . . there. Or here—within. Sister touches her hidden breast—It’s right here, boys and girls. If you listen.

  It’s the beam of consciousness glinting on experience, claiming it. That’s why we all know what Rosebud, Rosebud means, whispered at the end of the movie—it’s the fragment of self imprinted as the emblem of consciousness. What’s left of the nugget of self, innocent yet apprehending reality. The embrace of the whole wide world of living.

  * * *

  —

  Life, if you’re lucky, is divided into thirds, my father used to say: youth, middle age, and “you look good.” The dawn of that third stage winks, is just cutting me in the eye as I lift my hand against its rise. It isn’t
simply that at this point more life is behind me—behind any middle-aged person—than lies ahead. Middle-aged? Who am I kidding. An interviewer asked Alice Munro when she turned sixty how she felt to be middle-aged. Middle-aged? she said. Who do you know who’s 120?

  So it’s not just about aging. But by the time you’ve worked long enough, hard enough, Real Life (which insists on being capitalized as if it were a personage with a proper name and a right to barge into this rental unit called your life) begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment. Real Life wishes to be left to its own purposeless devices.

  This isn’t sloth, it isn’t laziness. It isn’t even exhaustion. It is a late-arriving awareness of consciousness existing for its own purpose, rippling with contentment and curiosity. One’s own idiosyncrasy reveals itself as a pleasure, without other value—but golden, amusing, integrity hard-won and now at its leisure. Hand on heart, this life of the mind, lolling—tending to life’s real business.

  This latter stage of existence suggests that the ultimate task, the real to-do, is: waste your life in order to find it. Who said that? Or said something like that. Jesus? Buddha? Bob Dylan? Somebody who knew what’s what.

  * * *

  —

  Even the search for timelessness happens in history: mine is the first year of the notorious American Baby Boom. You’re a Boomer—as if this generation were named for the bomb, the midcentury annihilator that was birthed about the time I was conceived. My mother murmurs again from her whirlwind of cigarette smoke: We had to drop the bomb, darling. It ended the War. It saved lives.

  We got all the good stuff. The postwar hope-and-determination of our Depression-era parents was piled upon us, and we’ve been burning it up, the fossil fuel of earlier generations we spent without a care. No college debt, the “liberal arts” a reasonable study for four years, or six or eight. We had a preposterously long sense of our own youthfulness. And a limitless sense of our choices. Indulgences galore. Many certainties (Make Love, Not War! The Personal Is Political!), which we called rights and ideals. Never was a petulance as gleeful and buoyant as ours. We were even right about some of it. As if being right were the same as being real.