And this is why I’d had to come to New Orleans a second time, this time alone, but having taken the precautionary measure of making an appointment to speak with Father Tony. (As a type, the journalist who is reluctant to talk to his sources offers a deep and heretofore untapped reservoir of farcical comedy and pathos for novelists or screenwriters in search of subjects.)
Father Tony understood. Even the best of us sometimes indulge in this kind of inexplicable foot-dragging. Even when we think we know what we should do, something inside us prevents it. To draw on the early church for an example: St. Augustine’s stubborn commitment to thievery, hedonism, and promiscuity. He couldn’t help himself. “I loved my own error,” Augustine wrote of his wild youth.
Rejecting the wishes of his mother that he marry respectably, Augustine instead undertook a fifteen-year-long affair with a woman who bore him a son. Augustine’s mother prayed unceasingly for her son’s conversion and when she died, he was racked with guilt for having lived so wantonly and for having put off conversion so long, despite his mother’s prayers. The dominant motif of the Confessions is Augustine’s self-reproach for his hitherto wasted life and for his delay in accepting Christian belief. “Too late have I loved Thee, O Lord,” he wrote, in an expression that would echo through centuries of Christian hymns and prayers.
Augustine’s anguish is recognizable to anyone who has waited too long to do something important, who has seen a crucial moment pass unseized, let an opportunity pass. It was Augustine who gave us the idea of original sin, a theology that any procrastinator could appreciate, premised as it is on the hard-to-refute assertion that there is something really, essentially wrong with all of us. Augustine, by the way, spent about fifteen years working on a series of studies of the Book of Genesis—roughly the same investment of time Darwin made in his barnacles—and, like Darwin, resisted completing and publishing his work long after his friends told him to wrap it up already and move on.
Augustine’s real twin isn’t Darwin, but the legendary Expedite. Augustine and Expedite make a saintly Odd Couple—one who left an indelible mark on Western intellectual history and one who likely never existed. They lived (or, in Expedite’s case, was supposed to have lived) within a century of each other. Both led aggressively un-Christian early lives before reforming themselves. But it is revealing that Augustine—the one who postponed change for such an agonizingly long time, who was racked with guilt over his behavior, who wrote with such impassioned regret—is the one who in the end proved so deeply influential, the one whose ideas are studied and whose works are read nearly two thousand years after his death.
The other, Expedite, was resolute and certain and heroic in stomping out the temptation in his life. As only a fictional figure could be.
Portraits of Expedite always show him in his Roman soldier’s togs, carrying a cross and stepping on his nemesis, the crow. The vanquished bird holds in his beak a scroll bearing the Latin word for tomorrow, CRAS, the root of the English word “procrastination” and a close approximation of the sound of a crow’s distinctive croak. The cross Expedite holds in his portraits reads HODIE—Latin for “today.” There could be no plainer picture of the ascendancy of the immediate over the deferred, action over delay. The crow never had a chance.
* * *
Expedite’s crow is a cousin to other literary and legendary birds: trickster ravens in Norse and Native American myth, for example, and poet Ted Hughes’s mythic crows for another. The Hughes poem that most directly tackles delay and deferral isn’t about crows. It’s called “Thrushes,” and in it the title birds are portrayed as nothing less than automatic killing machines. Spared the irresolution and the procrastination that plagues humans (like the dawdling poet), they are portrayed as single-minded, instinctual, ruthless.
Because Hughes’s bird is more efficient than the poet, it is represented as a more complete creature. (Completeness is a big deal in the Old Testament, too, where the laws governing warfare issued in Deuteronomy command that the warrior who has not yet harvested his vineyard or finished building his home is unfit to fight for his people.) There is no romanticism about Hughes’s bird, there are no pretty songs heralding the dawn. Hughes offers a more biologically accurate version of bird-dom—single-minded, untroubled, and therefore more terrible. Contra Emily Dickinson, Hughes’s thing with feathers is death.
Death is the one obligation that cannot be postponed or procrastinated away. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” stars another talking member of the species Corvus, and like Expedite’s crow, the bird is described as a “tempter,” “devil,” and “fiend”—and most relevantly, one that won’t go away no matter how many times he is asked. But in Poe’s poem, unlike the St. Expedite legend, the avian herald of death wins the battle with the human he haunts. He remains perched “on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door” even after the speaker of the poem has succumbed.
Poe was himself a committed procrastinator. He wrote in a letter to the poet James Russell Lowell, “I am excessively slothful and wonderfully industrious by fits.” His familiarity with the feast-and-famine work habits of the procrastinator helped him construct one of literature’s most perfect renditions of the procrastinator’s mind, in his story “The Imp of the Perverse.”
We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us,—of the definite with the indefinite—of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails,—we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies—it disappears—we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!
Poe’s “too late” echoes Augustine’s “too late.” Like the saint, Poe was spiritually inclined toward regret. During his last years, stricken with grief over the death of his young wife, Virginia, Poe lived near a community of Jesuit priests in the Bronx and visited them at night, sometimes to use their library, but often to have dinner with them or to join in their games of cards. The depressed poet found consolation with the priests and wrote gratefully that they were “highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars, they smoked and they drank and they played cards and they never said a word about religions.”
The priests looked after Poe. When the poet was overcome with grief, or with drink, or with some combination of the two, one of the Jesuits would walk him home. Some have wondered why the priests never tried to bring Poe to their faith, never offered him the sacraments. A sympathetic ear, a steadying hand on a wobbly walk home, yes, but never a word about religion. Poe died in mysterious circumstances in Baltimore in 1849. According to one story, his last words were “Lord, help my poor soul.”
* * *
Expedite and Augustine and Poe suggest an alternative way of understanding procrastination. More than just a matter of mood or of irrational decision-making or of poor time management, procrastination can be a matter of life and death. All of us are aware of the clock ticking, of our time running out. But deep down we also hope that somehow, magically, the clock might make an exception in our case. When I was a kid, nothing scared me more than the idea of eternity. I used to sit up at night in bed trying to understand the concept. How could tim
e go on forever? And, more important from the perspective of a self-absorbed preteen, what would happen to me? Nothing is more incomprehensible to a kid—and to some adults—than the idea of the world without him. It is an impossibility.
Eternal life scared me, too. Forget hell and the torment of the damned. What gave me the willies was the thought of my soul floating on through endless time. Endless time. This was supposed to be the big prize waiting for all of us. But just thinking about it was enough to make me break out in a sweat.
* * *
I have never prayed to Expedite, but I share his devotees’ optimism, their faith that good things will come. Procrastinators may be depressed, delusional, self-destructive, but we are also optimists; we believe that there will always be a better time than the present to do what needs to be done. Optimism is the quality most often overlooked in procrastinators. For us, tomorrow is always brimming with promise.
There can be something thrilling about delay. Maybe it is the thrill of transgression, the high that comes along with not doing what you are supposed to do when you are supposed to do it. There must be a reason, based in the principles of narrative presumably, that superheroes are always waiting until the last moment to arrive and save the day. Superheroes play out a secular version of religious conversion, transforming themselves from everyday, frail beings to other, more robust ones, while somehow remaining the same beings, all in service of producing some kind of salvation.
Augustine liked to portray mortal life itself as a pause; he called it “this delay from which I suffer.” He considered it an irksome postponement of the eternal life waiting for believers. Augustine was impatient to get on with it. That’s optimistic.
My optimism peaks almost immediately after I wake up. I’ve always liked mornings, and am less self-pitying, less of a pain in the ass then than at any other time of day. In the morning, anything seems possible. I am brimming with ideas! Potential! Love for others! I cannot be stopped. By four in the afternoon, I have given up entirely on myself and on humanity. This is why late afternoon is peak procrastination time. This is when, desperately, I give up on the day and invest everything in tomorrow. I have made a religion of bailing out of the present and living for tomorrow morning.
Belief in tomorrow is a species of faith: if I can only make it until tomorrow, it seems to me, everything will be new again, hope resurrected. For procrastinators, hope always triumphs over experience. I suppose that’s a pretty workable definition of faith.
The day I finally got to meet Father Tony at Our Lady of Guadalupe, I found myself with a few minutes to kill, and so decided to duck into the church. It was about four in the afternoon, and a few blocks away on Bourbon Street, the partying was already well under way. On my way over, I passed a nightclub where, in the front door, stood a woman in hot pants with her companion, a muscle-shirted dude with tree-trunk arms and a ponderous gut. She called out to me, “Come party with us, honey.” Something, maybe the presence of the dude in the muscle shirt, made me pretend I hadn’t heard.
Inside Our Lady of Guadalupe, things were quieter. An elderly woman prayed a rosary near the altar. In the back of the church sat a few people who looked as if they might not have anywhere else to go, loitering in the pews. The church ticked in the heat. No one was paying much attention to St. Expedite.
In the early Christian church, it was almost universally expected that the Last Days and Final Judgment were imminent, around the corner, sure to come sooner rather than later. The expectation drove some people slightly crazy. Every few decades or so, a frenzied panic would overcome large groups of believers. Certain of the need to repent before it was too late, they gave away all they had, formed messianic mobs, walked across Europe to visit holy sites, and launched violent Crusades.
This kind of anxiety is not unique to believers. Who hasn’t feared missing out, waiting too long, being left behind? Living with urgency requires belief in something, even if it is something no bigger than your insignificant self. The most religious question most of us ask is not “Why am I here?” but “How much longer do I have?”
It makes me think of a story Father Tony told me during my second visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe—one of those humorous, Reader’s Digest-y anecdotes that Catholic priests like to sprinkle in their Sunday sermons to draw a few laughs and keep the congregation awake for a few more minutes: It seems one day a preacher asked his flock how many of them wanted to go to heaven. All in attendance raised their hands except one holdout. The preacher, peering out over the congregation, asked the lone exception if it was really true that he didn’t want to go to heaven. The man responded, “Of course I want to go to heaven, Father. But it sounded like you were planning on making the trip today.”
Augustine called his life “this delay from which I suffer” because he was ready to make his trip to paradise as soon as possible. Most of us aren’t so sure. There is a native ambivalence about us that makes us resist even the most perfect thing.
Heaven sounds promising. But not yet.
4
A Brief History of the To-Do List
Who would write who had anything better to do?
—Lord Byron, in his journal
The Italian writer Umberto Eco was obsessed with lists. Eco had been known only in academic circles, as a semiotician, until he wrote a hugely successful 1980 novel called The Name of the Rose. A Sherlock Holmes–ish story transplanted to fourteenth-century Italy with a monk (William of Baskerville) standing in for the detective, it was made into a lousy movie starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater. The book’s success turned Eco into a very unlikely celebrity. He was a celebrity who liked to read dictionaries. Once, when asked which book he would choose to keep him company in solitude on a desert island, he chose a telephone directory.
In a book called The Infinity of Lists, Eco suggested that lists are our only way to express the things that defy expression. In Homer’s Iliad, the poet attempts to describe the Greek forces arrayed for the invasion of Troy, but gives up. Instead, he offers a list: the Catalogue of Ships, a 350-line roll call of the Greek commanders and their troops.
Eco said we are attracted to lists because of their infinitude. Lists have no limits and can never be complete. “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits, and therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death,” Eco said. “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
I am a slightly compulsive list-maker, but the one kind of list I have never made is a bucket list. I have never made a bucket list because I lack the physical courage to do many of the things that would qualify for a bucket list—I would never skydive or hang glide or run a marathon or climb Mount Everest, for example.
Bucket lists operate at the intersection of acquisitiveness and self-improvement; they reveal an urge to polish our résumés and pile up impressive experiences right to the very end. Credit for popularizing the term goes to Justin Zackham, who wrote the screenplay for the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman film of the same name. The idea for the screenplay came from Zackham’s own list of things he wanted to do before dying. You may have already guessed that number one on his list was to write a screenplay that would be produced by a major Hollywood studio.
The other reason I have never made a bucket list is that it requires acknowledging my own mortality and I am resolutely not in favor of acknowledging my own mortality. To complete a task is to make it disappear, and in some way, to make ourselves disappear, too. This also accounts for why I so often fail to complete my to-do lists. As long as I have things to do before me, preferably an infinitely unrealizable series of things, there is no limit to how long I can continue to put them off. What could be more discouraging than crossing off the last item on the last to-do list? I want the lists to go on forever—and me, too, if possible.
* * *
When I returned from New Orleans, I had a longish list of jobs waiting for me, some big,
some small, and it was then that I finally saw the point of making oblations to St. Expedite. The point is, of course, that it is helpful to have someone other than yourself to blame for not getting your work done. I had bought at least three prayer cards in the gift shop at Our Lady of Guadalupe, and still I was getting so very little done. Didn’t this seem a little unfair? I understood better than ever all the decapitated Expedite figures on the roadsides of Réunion Island.
Meanwhile, I kept sliding deeper and deeper into a hole relative to my deadlines—a hole being a void, and avoiding being about the only thing I was doing about work right then. Tasks like updating my Twitter profile all of a sudden seemed more vitally important than anything else I could imagine. I spent most of one day editing my collection of digital music files. I think “curating” is the word used now.
The more I resolved to stay on task, the more unfocused I became. My inability to work depressed me and—you know how this works—my depression made it impossible for me to work. Entire workweeks passed in a fog of distraction and task avoidance. Searching for a quote in a book on my shelves, I would find a collection of music criticism that I had never gotten around to reading, and even though it wasn’t at all what I was looking for, I would take it down, and before long I would be deep into a reconsideration of the New Zealand garage-pop scene of the 1980s.
And I would have totally forgotten what it was that I had gone looking for in the first place.
I knew I should stop procrastinating, and resolved to do so, but even in this regard I was too often guilty of what I suppose you could call meta-procrastination, in which my resolve to stop procrastinating evaporated and I ended up doing nothing about my tendency to do nothing.
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