The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  But now the Boomers are approaching the other side. Not death necessarily (though the time has begun when no one will say we were cut down too early). Not death, but we’re reaching the other side of striving, past ambition. Good luck over there in pastureland.

  What a surprise—to discover it’s all about leisure, apparently, this fugitive Real Life, abandoned all those years to the “limitless capacity for toil.” What a hard worker you are: always taken as a compliment. You can count on me. Smiling. Deadline met. Always.

  You should try meditating or maybe yoga, yoga’s good, someone suggested when I mentioned the fevered to-do lists, the sometimes alarming blood pressure readings, the dark-night-of-the-soul insomnia.

  But meditating is just another thing. Yoga? Another task, yet another item for the to-do list. I find I cannot add another item. I’m done.

  This particular battle between striving and serenity may be distinctly American. The struggle between toil and Real Life is a legacy we cannot reject or deny, coming to us as a birthright, the way a Frenchman expects to have decent wine at a reasonable price, and the whole month of August on vacation.

  Maybe it goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, our “founding document.” Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How proud I’ve always been, through the years of war protesting, the radical this and progressive that, to think of those words. What luck to be born into this buoyant heritage. What country was ever founded on the idea of happiness? Crazy. Good crazy. We aren’t ideologues with a Five-Year Plan for civic betterment. We address happiness individually, conceive of it as an intensely personal project, each of us busy about our own bliss. Loved that, love it still.

  But a canker forms on the rose. That unlikely word happiness charmed me, made me proud to be an American, not just for my own sake, but because everyone was enjoined to think about a personal project of delight—even if it couldn’t be accomplished. Of course happiness is an illusion. Still, a beautiful one—I’ll pledge allegiance to it.

  But happiness is the only word in the Declaration of Independence triad that doesn’t stand alone. Happiness is not, like life and liberty, a given, what Henry James called a donnée, the starter that gets you going on the story you write. Happiness in the American credo is a job. It must be pursued. It may not be clear what it is, but you better get hold of it. Your fault, sucker, if you can’t somehow nab it for yourself.

  I was mistaken. The essential American word isn’t happiness. It’s pursuit.

  This is where the struggle is engaged—happiness as a project, a national enterprise. It is the root of Ben Franklin’s list-making legacy, the burden of proof laid on the frail individual. Not happiness but its pursuit is the loneliness coiled in the heart of the American dream. That least dreamy of dreams, suited up with effort and determination.

  Even a postmodern to-do list is not the answer. Go ahead—meditate, do yoga, buy probiotic foods, all that.

  How about just giving up? Giving up the habit of struggle. Maybe it’s a matter of giving over. To what? Perhaps what an earlier age called “the life of the mind,” that phrase I fastened on to describe the sovereign self at ease, at home in the world when I decided to embrace that key occasion of sin—the daydream. Happiness redefined as looking out the window and taking things in—not pursuing them. Taking in whatever is out there, seeing how it beckons. And letting it go. On and on, out of range, a cloud passing, changing shape but still a cloud, still moving.

  Other cultures labor, but what other nation enjoins each separate citizen to tackle happiness as a solo endeavor, a mission, this crazy paradox of a hunt for something that cannot, after all, be earned, but can only be bestowed from the mysterious recesses of life? Give it up. Waste the day, building up solidarity. Empathy is bred of aimlessness, just gazing, of having no agenda, and in a sense no self. The no self is the real self. Something like that.

  That’s what that model lounger Walt Whitman did, the un–Ben Franklin American. I loaf and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. In this way he came to his great conception of national citizenship for Americans—the dear love of comrades.

  It’s no coincidence that our most American poet hands out this contrary notion—to loaf—in the midst of what he called in his westward-ho century America’s “Democratic Vistas.” Not much said about American vistas these days. Instead, plans for a wall on our southern border. And individualism? Does it lead to individual happiness or is its tragic destiny autocracy when it is claimed by a strongman?

  The next generation, we’re told, will not have the upwardly mobile lives we have had (or thought we were having). For starters, just look at their college debt. Ask the server in the hip farm-to-table restaurant who is reciting the evening specials from memory what the subject of his dissertation is, the PhD he finished four years ago.

  Loafing and inviting your soul is not a prudent business plan, not a life plan, not even a recognizably American project Ben Franklin or Jimmy Gatz would care to . . . pursue. But it begins to look a little like happiness, the kind that comes to claim you, unbidden. Stay put and let the world show up? Or get out there and be a flaneur, wandering along? Which is it? I’m looking out the window, I’m reading Whitman, I’m reading Montaigne. Also, I’m taking the dog for a long walk. She’s nosing our way forward.

  * * *

  You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

  —Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

  Sometimes the translation of that last line is rendered “the world . . . will writhe in ecstasy at your feet.” Hotter, definitely. Writhing is animal, sweaty, the world as struggling beast or as lover in the heat of pain and pleasure. Rolling, on the other hand, is slack, the sea of life whooshing and washing, lapping forward effortlessly.

  The passage is most often translated as roll. I’m going with writhe. I would rather believe that life rolls along, but everything points to the likelihood that it writhes.

  There are many injunctions to solitude like Kafka’s, all easily googled, often copied into notebooks by the young and ardent seeking direction, seeking wisdom, as I have copied such lines in notebook and journal year after year from youth to where I find myself now: the final third (if life is that neatly sectioned, if I stay lucky that long). A rainy day and I’ve been reading old notebooks, copying passages from my thickened collection going back years, decades:

  We seek retreats for ourselves, houses in the country, seashores, mountains. But . . . we have in our power to retire into ourselves. For there is no retreat that is quieter and freer from trouble than our soul . . . perfect tranquility, the right ordering of mind.

  —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  A man [sic!—the sic added smugly in 1972, a robustly feminist period in my notebook life] can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

  —Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

  Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

  —E. M. Cioran, Strangled Thoughts [entire passage crossed out when Cioran’s professed “Hitlerist” past came to light. “Never trust anyone that gloomy,” written in damp, spreading ballpoint in the margin of the X’ed-out passage]

  Without going out the door, you can know the whole universe.

  Without looking through the window, you can see the ways of heaven.

  The farther you go, the less you know.

  Thus the sage knows without traveling,

&n
bsp; sees without looking,

  acts without doing.

  —Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching

  Most famously, Pascal’s declaration that has dogged me longest: All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s [sic! sic!] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

  I first read that baleful line, living at home during college, itching to Get Out, the stereotypic midwestern frustration (though I didn’t know I was a type—how original I thought my angst was). Lemme outta here. I thought the world (which I called inwardly “the great world”) was not the problem (home was the problem). The world (a.k.a. freedom) was the solution.

  These sour discouragements against setting forth, getting into the fray or the circus or whatever is out there, have sounded wise to me at one time or another, against my wanderlust will. Perhaps that was inevitable: I was taught (“trained,” as they said) by cloistered nuns, paradoxically the first independent women I knew, and still the most vivid in memory (the only place they live anymore—Regina, Peronne, Immaculata, Mary Gertrude, Maria Coeli—all gone to glory, and none to take their places).

  We caught a glimpse of their mysterious lives behind the filmy black curtain dividing the cloister from our side of the chapel. Enclosure, silence, chanted Latin murmurings. It was romantic and dead serious. They were staying in their rooms (cells!), watching the world make all its mistakes, praying and forgiving, waiting for the next madness so they could pray and forgive some more. There was the sense that precisely because they weren’t out there they saw it all. Observation was not an act of experience, but of the imagination. This made perfect sense.

  From the limitation of their enclosure, absurdly, they saw everything. Even their lack of experience was impressive, a badge of higher knowledge. Sister, a girl asked on a fine May morning, can we have class outside in the courtyard, will you give us the green light? The ancient nun, a tiny leprechaun (she hailed from Boston and wanted us in Minnesota to pronounce been as bean), looked mystified, but corrected the girl’s grammar first: May you—may you have class outside. Then to the question itself: What do you mean, dear, a green light? she asked mildly. She’d been in the cloister over fifty years, and had never seen a traffic light. We were not disdainful. We were impressed, as if prehistory stood before us, alive and breathing.

  They wore habits designed in the sixteenth century by their foundress, before the invention of buttons or hooks (buttons were invented?). They were forever replacing a straight pin to anchor a wimple or a veil. It was a graceful gesture, the hands light and deft fluttering around the fabric, white linen, black serge. The folds of the gowns were heavy, cut with couture severity, often patched tidily. They stayed in place—habits, veils, long lives in their minimalist cells.

  The idea was to stay put, keep your lip buttoned while the secret door or window of the heart/mind opened of its own volition to reality. Stay. Don’t seek. Let it all come at you, rolling or writhing.

  And yet. Our most ancient metaphor says life is a journey. Not to mention the flyover midwestern heart, beating to Get Out. Midwesterners give over to the fiction of flight passionately, the desire to be Elsewhere is the native trait. Flyover, fly away.

  We must set out, often without a destination, with only the instinct to search as a direction. Literature and religion are predicated on the notion of journey, movement—pilgrimage it’s called in religion, plot in literature. Life’s deepest pursuit is understood as a trudge: Moses on the forty-year desert camping trip, even Jesus isn’t just nailed to the Cross. He treks the Way of the Cross to achieve Golgotha. The hajj to Mecca. And the Buddha? He doesn’t start by sitting—first he roams.

  Life is a journey. A hopeless cliché. But not its fault. Cliché is the fate of every fully absorbed truth. The stars, for example, do look like diamonds. You just can’t say so.

  Even storytelling, our simplest way to escape, begins with a journey—Dante in exile roaming with Virgil. And English literature (my major in college, still my major, it seems) starts with The Canterbury Tales ambling along the first English narrative pathway. The journey is plotless, mimicking life with its refusal to organize itself into a coherent “narrative arc.” The Canterbury Tales is a series of stories, tall tales, beads strung on the thread of regional pilgrimage. Our literature begins as group tourism.

  “Real” people—the randy Wife of Bath, the impoverished Knight—fabricate their fictions to amuse each other on their supposedly nonfiction way from south London to coastal Kent to venerate a saint. And of course to get away, just to escape. The pilgrimage is as much away as toward:

  Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

  The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

  And bathed every veyne in swich licour

  Of which vertu engendred is the flour . . .

  Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

  And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

  Springtime, after a winter cooped up, and everyone wants to hit the road. Those medieval tourists, the “palmers” who had already made the big pilgrimage to Jerusalem and returned with their palm frond souvenirs, even they seek straunge strondes, shores as far afield as they can manage. It’s deep, this instinct to move. And never satisfied.

  But if leisure (the leisure that promotes the life of the mind) is what’s missing from our overamped world, if the rich multitasked life is the problem, shouldn’t a person stay put, lie low?

  This is the dilemma, my dilemma, maybe an essential contemporary middle-class dilemma: To stay? Or to go? Be Pascal? Or be Chaucer?

  * * *

  —

  If you’re a “seeker” (and who, opening a book, is not?), isn’t the open road the only way, paradoxically, to find the lost life of daydream where all the rest—wisdom, decency, generosity, compassion, joy, and plain honesty—are sequestered?

  If life is a journey, has it just become a getaway to somewhere warm on JetBlue? How to be a pilgrim without being either a tourist or, worse, a pious trekker, lugging freeze-dried soup on your back, believing it’s all about “getting away”—especially from other people?

  Not my problem. I don’t want to get away from anyone. I want someone back. But that can’t happen.

  What would it be like to believe we’d meet again, he and I? Heaven, life after life—one trip I can’t imagine. The beautiful hand that held mine all those years—gone. Gone for good (strange phrase—what’s good about it?). Dust now. Ashes, in fact, but the biblical word insists—for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return, as if to make the point: we’re not simply reduced to our burnt leftovers. We return to the earth, become the anonymous stuff of the planet.

  To travel to get away from absence—that’s more like it. Not to get away from someone or anyone. Not even to get away from sadness (the sweet melancholy that makes so much poetry), though maybe to avoid the kindly pity so generously offered.

  The road, then, not the room.

  Back to the notebooks, the stash I’ve been adding to methodically, like a retirement fund building all these years, a diverse portfolio of growth stocks, many of them collapsed to nothing (Cioran—out! Even Marcus Aurelius, once such a strong contender, strikes me now as a tedious bluffer).

  There, winking from one notebook to another, but mostly ignored and unquoted, popping up now like a friend I keep meaning to reestablish contact with, is the boy with bold ideas and opinions beyond his years, followed up the sixteenth-century château staircase by his lute player. Michel Montaigne, sluggish, lax, drowsy.

  This is the writer, midway between Chaucer’s pilgrimage in the fourteenth century and Kafka’s reclusiveness in the twentieth, who chooses to sit in a cold stone tower and see what will roll or writhe his way.

  Yet Montaigne reports that he is most alive on his horse, galloping on the road in all weathers. I don’t portray being. I portray passing. He doesn’t mean the passage of eras, of history, it
s long broken arc. He means movement “minute to minute,” the inner tick-tock of thought. He means he portrays—paints is the added meaning of the word in French—what passes through the mind. His own.

  Follow him then, the first modern. So go. And also—stay.

  * * *

  To Go

  Programmed for pilgrimage, squeezing the lemon of location for all it’s worth, looking for meaning, the last drop left over from the lived life of others. Location, location, location, as if life were fundamentally a real estate transaction.

  My own life list, as birders say of their sightings, is long. Freud’s house at Berggasse 19 in Vienna? Been there, wrote it up. Leaving the flat, annoyed that the effort of finding the building (it was not yet on the tourist track) hadn’t been worth the trouble. Then, pausing on the clammy staircase, dark moss and springy lichen in the shadowy corner, the dart of realization, the sensation that just here, on the turn of the stone landing, his patients must have stopped too, pivoting from the session back into their real (or feigned) lives. I had stumbled, I felt sure, on the locus of many revelations.

  Later, I tracked The Couch to Hampstead. But he wasn’t there. The landing outside the Vienna flat was where he was to be found, head turned away, white hair thinning, faint odor—a chewed cigar, but of course it was just the sodden scent of rain from earlier in the day.

  Closer to home, a road trip to Iowa to find Dvořák, wandering around the Turkey River, tiny tributary of the Mississippi, to visit the Czech-settled farm town of Spillville where he spent the summer of 1893. Hoping to hear, as he had, the scarlet tanager drilling the motif of the scherzo of the American Quartet. Didn’t find the bird, but, amazingly, found Dvořák. A stump by the Turkey River where he sat, listening, getting the local boys to flush birds for him. His pretty daughter Otilka fancied a Kickapoo drummer—that was the end of the family’s unlikely summer in Iowa. I sussed a book out of that too.