Soon

by Andrew Santella

  In this effort to improve my work habits Laura also set my computer to announce the time, at every half hour, in a voice that sounded a little like Stephen Hawking’s speech-generation device. “It’s two o’clock,” Not–Stephen Hawking would declare, and then what seemed like just a few seconds later, during which time I might have done nothing better than look at online photos of adorable corgis, Not–Stephen Hawking would announce, “It’s two thirty.” Taken together, the message of all these automated proclamations was clear: “Another day is dying. You are failing.” I found that I was reliving on a daily basis the old end-of-weekend dread of my school days, when Sunday afternoon would dwindle into Sunday night, the promise of another weekend fading, replaced by the looming dread of school’s soul-killing obligations. Not–Stephen Hawking didn’t really motivate me to get to work, but he did make me want to throw my laptop out the window.

  One of the problems may have been that at around this same time, I was using a Fitbit as a kind of digital taskmaster that measured how far I walked each day and how many calories I burned. This seemed like a good idea, except that my wife also bought a Fitbit and the two of us are very competitive, and so we became obsessed with outwalking each other. Each day I added more and more steps to my daily circuit, and made sure to tell my wife how many more steps I had added, thinking that this information would impress her. But of course she, too, had added steps to her daily routine, often more steps than I had added, and so I was compelled to walk even farther. It was like a cold war for pedestrians—mindless escalation sprung from insecurity. Entire days I spent in an exhausting pursuit of distance, which really didn’t leave a lot of time for other activities, including work. None of the important things I had to do at the time mattered more to me than defeating my wife in our FitBit Pace-Off. Those other obligations, I decided, would just have to wait. I had miles to go before I could do what I should have been doing.

  I guess you could call it ironic that my FitBit, which I had hoped would introduce a Taylor-esque discipline to my workday, instead ended up abetting my tendency to procrastinate. But I don’t want to give the FitBit too much credit here, or too much blame, for that matter. The truth is that if I make up my mind to procrastinate, I don’t need any kind of device to justify the impulse. I am, like so many of us, a powerfully self-motivated shirker.

  It is a challenge for any procrastinator to live in our world of digital alerts, pokes, and nudges, all reminding us of some duty or other. These are examples of what people who think about these sorts of things call the extended will. The phrase refers to strategies to goad ourselves or trick ourselves into activity. The strategies may be psychological, like the bundling of tasks to pair an activity you like with one you loathe: thinking about how much money you are making while you endure the tedium of your cubicle, for example. Other strategies are environmental, like the construction of “chutes” to propel you into a task: setting out everything you need the night before for a first-thing-in-the-morning run, for example.

  The need for an extended will suggests that plain, old-fashioned will is not quite up to the job. Willpower doesn’t enjoy the currency it once did, maybe because so much social-science research demonstrates how lousy we are at controlling ourselves. (Does it not seem that there is now an entire sector of the American academy devoted to quantifying exactly what research subjects will do to get an extra cookie or a bonus marshmallow? Call it the Marshmallow Industrial Complex.)

  It is nice to think that you could just will yourself to do what needs to be done. But it turns out there are a couple of problems with willpower. As the psychologist Roy Baumeister has suggested, willpower can be thought of as a muscle that responds to regular use and atrophies when neglected. Thus, your willpower may or may not be prepared to help you when called upon. And what about all those other free wills out there, some of them in competition with my free will, determined to obstruct it? My will, in turn and without even meaning to, ends up colliding with theirs. The end result is that just about no one gets to do what they really want to do.

  * * *

  Some of the first public clocks appeared on priapic towers that rose in towns on the Italian peninsula in the 1300s. They were the product of an intense competition among emerging city-states for power, prestige, trade, and money. Any city aspiring to prominence had to have a public clock—and the bigger, taller, and louder, the better. The competition spawned an intercivic contest to build clock towers taller and more impressive than any others. Even now you can find at least a half dozen Italian cities that claim “the most beautiful clock in Italy.”

  This new time-telling technology was quickly adapted to the purposes of employers. So it was in fourteenth-century Italy that business owners first deployed clocks as a means to regulate the working lives of their employees. The marble quarry near Lake Maggiore, where workers cut away at stone for Milan’s cathedral amid the voluptuous scents of the adjacent lemon groves, got its own clock in 1418. It controlled the working day of the laborers there, just as other clocks ruled the prayer life of the monks in their monasteries and the business day of the rising merchant class in town.

  This is also when clocks began to tell us what we were worth. From the beginning, these rising towers enabled a new attitude toward time and the need to deploy it wisely. The one in Siena’s Piazza del Campo, the Torre del Mangia, was supposedly named after a lazy bell ringer nicknamed Mangiaguadagni, “the profit eater,” or the eater of time. The cautionary tale goes that Mangiaguadagni’s profligacy cost him his job; to replace him, the tower was soon fitted with a mechanical brass ringer. He may have been the first worker in history to lose his job in the name of greater, mechanized productivity.

  Like the disgruntled arsenal workers at Watertown, most of us recognize that to conform to dictated timelines and schedules is to cede some measure of individuality and humanity. Most of us also recognize that getting along in the world requires the occasional compromise. The things we do, the things we put off doing, the things we plan to do someday—these all define us, even if we don’t fully understand why we are doing or not doing them.

  It was only a few decades after clock towers began rising all over Italy that the procrastinating, deadline-shattering Leonardo sketched his Vitruvian Man, an effort to define and depict an ideally proportioned human. Leonardo’s ideal man is shown inside a circle, arms raised.

  He looks like nothing so much as a clock.

  6

  Seeds

  Cras melior est.

  —Motto of the Lichtenbergian Society

  In the last decades of the eighteenth century, strollers on the streets of Göttingen in Lower Saxony became accustomed to seeing a man on the top floor of a half-timbered house on the Gotmarstrasse peering down at them as they walked. This was Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, one of the intellectual superstars of Enlightenment Europe.

  A sensationally popular lecturer and showman of the sciences at the University of Göttingen in the 1760s, Lichtenberg was an eighteenth-century version of today’s globetrotting academic luminaries: member of an intellectual circle that included Goethe, Kant, and Alessandro Volta; stager of science demonstrations that drew students and admirers from around Europe; chummy conversational partner to the king of England. If there had been TED Talks in the Enlightenment, Lichtenberg probably would have been pacing the stage in a periwig and wireless headset.

  Lichtenberg was tiny and humpbacked and also something of a rock star. His lectures were routinely packed with visitors who had traveled to Göttingen to see him. He was hired at the university not only for his scientific abilities, but also because the administration hoped that his charisma, reputation, and showmanship would attract other scholars.

  His life seemed to overflow with ideas and enthusiasms. That overflow could be problematic. Lichtenberg never seemed able to focus his energies. Or was it that Lichtenberg wasn’t interested in focusing? Again and again, Lichtenberg did work that laid a foundation for new breakthroughs, only to
leave the breaking through to others. Lichtenberg demonstrated the scientific basis for hot-air balloon flight years before the Montgolfier brothers were able to achieve the first actual balloon flight. He himself never tried to leave the ground.

  Lichtenberg spoke often of writing a novel in the style of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. But there never seemed to be time. There were always lectures to give, letters to write, strolls to take. At his death, at fifty-six, Lichtenberg had finished only a few pages of his novel.

  He dabbled. The wide scope of Lichtenberg’s intellectual curiosity was part of his appeal, part of his genius. He lectured on astronomy and mathematics and geodesy and volcanology and meteorology and experimental physics. He authored an extended art-critical analysis of the prints of the English artist William Hogarth. He wrote short essays about what we would call psychology. Lichtenberg was sometimes frustrated by his own dabbling, by his failure to stick to the task at hand. The regret is unmistakable in one of his diary entries: “I had Montgolfier’s invention within my reach,” he wrote with the dismay of one smacking himself on the forehead.

  Even in his achievements, you find traces of Lichtenberg’s procrastination. One of his great discoveries in electrostatics came as a result of stepping away from his work one day to tidy up the scientific equipment in his laboratory—just the kind of task-avoidance any procrastinator would recognize. He had built an electrophorus, a metal disk about six feet in diameter, a device popularized by his friend Volta and used to generate an electrostatic charge. Probably seeking a reason—any reason—to put off work, he was one day moving things here and there around the laboratory and noticed that some dust on the disk had gathered in clusters, “like stars at certain points,” he wrote. When he brushed the disk clean, the dust settled back into the same patterns. Charging the disk from a Leyden jar produced even funkier figures, like the product of an electrocharged Spirograph. Lichtenberg found that he could transfer the patterns from the disk onto paper.

  He had stumbled upon the principle behind electrostatic printing. Lichtenberg figured out ways to manipulate powder into patterns, like an artist, to produce visually pleasing images. These he preserved under glass. Some of them still exist, and they look like the sorts of things you might find at a garage sale, in the dollar-and-under box. They would make really cool thank-you gifts. It wasn’t until 1938 that Chester Carlson, with the advantage of two centuries’ worth of subsequent advances, used Lichtenberg’s discovery to develop xerography.

  Lichtenberg’s disinclination to focus his energies—let’s go ahead and call it his procrastination—helps explain his relative obscurity as a figure in the history of science. In fact, insofar as Lichtenberg is remembered at all today, it is not as a scientist but as an aphorist. For thirty-four years, from 1765 to 1799, Lichtenberg jotted observations, one-liners, ephemera, and putdowns of hostile critics (“Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told he gets an enormous erection . . .”) in what he called Sudelbücher, or “waste books.” The name referred to the eighteenth-century mercantile practice of recording notes of transactions in informal notebooks before transferring them into more durable and official ledgers. Lichtenberg filled his books with jottings, stray thoughts, and memoranda to himself. He never intended for any of it to be published. Yet they are what he is remembered for. Whatever claim on posterity he can make is based on the tossed-off witticisms in his Waste Books, which were published posthumously. They are said to have influenced latter-day essayists such as Susan Sontag and philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose late, aphoristic work displays a debt to Lichtenberg. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer all would cite his Waste Books frequently and admiringly.

  But the work Lichtenberg did publish and that made him notable in his time—his science, his travel writing, his art criticism—has been mostly forgotten.

  Aphorism suited Lichtenberg. It is the ideal form for a procrastinator—flashes of insight presented with no need for further elaboration or development or argument. For the aphorist, elaboration would only foul everything up. Wittgenstein, who was, like Lichtenberg, prone to the gnomic, said that arguments just spoil the beauty of perceptions. Trying to prop up an insight with evidence was like dirtying a flower with muddy hands. That was the image Wittgenstein deployed. Better to leave it be.

  Lichtenberg worked hard but never wanted to be seen to work hard. I get the feeling that he wasn’t against achievement, but thought achievement worth pursuing only if it could be done with a certain style. He seemed to aim for an intellectual sprezzatura, a seeming carelessness that masks effort. If you have to show your work, it only ruins the effect of effortlessness.

  Lichtenberg, like Wittgenstein, resorted to horticultural imagery in explaining his own work. He compared his jottings in The Waste Books to seeds, “which if they fall on the right soil may grow into chapters and even whole dissertations.” Like seeds, they were small but rich with possibility. They had generative potential. They were not, as he saw them, significant works themselves, but might have significance stored within them.

  So Lichtenberg’s life is a paradox: He dabbled and dithered where he was supposed to be most diligent. But the work he thought too trifling to publish has proven durable and deeply influential. It has taken root.

  In fairy tales, seeds become beanstalks that climb magically through clouds. They lead to danger, but also to treasure. When seeds are deployed as imagery they are usually standing in for an individual’s moral choices and their consequences. Willy Loman’s pathetic garden is an emblem of his hopelessness. Even Onan’s Old Testament seed-spilling is punished as an act of betrayal of his own people. His tribe depends on his procreative power and that of all its men for its survival. In that context, spilling seed isn’t perverse, it’s criminally irresponsible, and so was condemned in much the same terms that procrastination is condemned.

  Lichtenberg deplored his own procrastination, even while recognizing that it was necessary for him. He was ill for much of his life—or at least he thought he was. One observer called him “the Columbus of hypochondria.” He wrote: “I have often daydreamed about all manner of fantastic things for hours on end, at times when people thought I was very busy. I saw the drawbacks of this as regards loss of time.” But it was necessary. He called his daydreaming his “fantasy-cure” and compared its effectiveness to a visit to a spa or a hot spring.

  Lichtenberg was the kind of procrastinator who does something remarkable when he is supposed to be doing something else. His scatteredness was the source of his genius. It was itself a seed.

  * * *

  For a while in the eighteenth century there was a pipeline between Germany and England that delivered the Continent’s intellectuals to the island and in return sent some of England’s minor lordlets back to the mainland for schooling. Well into the nineteenth century, it was said, a peculiar dialect of Hanoverian English was common in Göttingen, kind of a precursor to the global English that now radiates out from airports and Hyatts across most of the world.

  Some of Lichtenberg’s Göttingen students were young English aristocrats, and they were so impressed with their tutor that they arranged for Lichtenberg to visit England. George III, whose roots were in Hanover, took a liking to the professor, partly because they could speak German to each other, but also because Lichtenberg added a little academic gravitas to the court. Lichtenberg toured the observatory at Richmond with the king, and the two became so chummy that George III would drop by Lichtenberg’s digs unannounced, seeking conversation with Herr Professor.

  I decided to go to Göttingen to visit Lichtenberg’s home and to learn what I could from the locals, but I worried a little about my almost complete ignorance of German. At one point before I left I had made tentative plans to take German lessons. When I say I made tentative plans, what I really mean is that for a while I told myself that I was going to find a German tutor, maybe some graduate student in need of funds, to teach me. But in fact I did nothing to actually find a
German tutor. What I did instead was read a lot of articles online about the mental-health benefits of learning a second language. These articles led me to more, similar articles, including several about America’s shameful lagging behind in language instruction, and finally an essay about America’s historical antipathy for foreign languages. (Apparently, for a while in the 1920s, Nebraska had a law on the books that made the teaching of a foreign language illegal.) Reading all this made me want to reproach my fellow Americans—even though, of course, I was myself only reading these articles as a pretext for avoiding taking my own German lessons. The familiar postponer’s dynamic was at work: the time I spent reading these articles about the need to learn another language excused me from the need to learn another language.

  As a result of my failure to study German, during my brief time in Germany, I existed in a cocoon of incomprehension. On the train from Frankfurt to Göttingen, listening to a string of announcements in German, I understood nothing, and that lack of understanding fostered, with astonishing ease, a sense of paranoia. There was something about the German language—though I knew, of course, the fault was in me—that made me think I was constantly being yelled at, reprimanded. Every train-station announcement sounded like some sort of formal notification that I was about to be arrested for unspecified crimes.

  I hoped that no one on the train would try to speak with me—not the conductor, not the ticket taker, not even the pretzel vendor. I didn’t think I was ready for conversation. I spent most of the ride paging through my German-English/English-German phrasebook, studying how to say, just in case I would need to, “I am an American, where is the nearest toilet?”