Outside the train window was the history-haunted German countryside, dotted with actual castles in a few spots. The nostalgic view was disorienting, because the train was so much sleeker, cleaner, faster, and more futuristic than the commuter plodders back home, and yet the faster we sped, the further back in time we seemed to be racing, back to Henry the Proud, back to Otto the Great, back to forgotten, pusillanimous Carolingians, the past weirdly contiguous with the future.
Göttingen is ancient. To an American like me, a Midwesterner whose idea of really old architecture is the shopping mall left over from the mid-twentieth century, the city might as well be Troy. Göttingen avoided Allied bombing during World War II, and so one can still come across houses and halls erected in the 1300s. A piece of the medieval wall that once encircled the town is still standing along the Turmstrasse, and today it is a favorite place for local loiterers to drink beer and menace pedestrians. The great age of the place, in combination with an abundance of good-looking university students riding bikes everywhere, is appealing. At least I found it appealing. Lichtenberg, on the other hand, called Göttingen a “dreadful hole.” But I suppose he earned the right to be so ungenerous because he made the place his home. Lichtenberg often talked of moving to Italy, home of his good friend Volta, but nothing ever came of it. Maybe he was daunted by his lack of Italian.
Lichtenberg was eventually rewarded for his loyalty to Göttingen with a number of local monuments erected in his honor. Next to the Paulinerkirche, which was the university library a half dozen centuries or so ago, a figure of Lichtenberg sits on a bench as if discoursing with his students, legs crossed like William F. Buckley Jr., his hump barely visible beneath the trailing ponytail of his wig. A few blocks away, behind the St.-Johannis-Kirche, he stands upright, all five feet of him, and his hump is pretty small here, too. Lichtenberg was such a little fellow that he is said to have sat on books while dining, so he could reach table height.
Göttingen loves its scientists, or at least it does now. In the 1930s, the Nazis decided the university there was a center of disreputable “Jewish physics”—fields like mathematical aerodynamics had pretty much been invented there—and nearly entire departments had to flee to the United States and United Kingdom. Today, many of the town’s strasses are named for these persecuted thinkers, and plaques on some of the older buildings announce what intellectual once lived there.
One of the consequences of waiting as long as I did to make travel plans—that is, one of the costs of procrastination—is that by the time you get where you are going, you have no idea where you should eat or whom you should eat with. You forfeit the chance at advance planning. When I went alone to have dinner at an Italian restaurant next to my hotel, I took a seat in what I thought was the restaurant’s bar area. It turned out to be an auxiliary all-purpose room used mostly by kitchen staff having a smoke on break. By the time I had figured out my mistake, I was too embarrassed to ask for another seat, maybe one in the actual dining room. Instead I decided to stick it out by myself in what I could now clearly see was not the bar area, where every so often a dishwasher would show up to have a smoke, look me over, and wonder why an American was eating in their break room. The friendliest face I saw all night belonged to a good-natured, short-legged mutt that walked in with one of the manager’s friends. The dog had been left near me in the not-bar, while the manager and his friend chatted, and for a while I had a good time talking to the animal in a doggyish cartoon voice and sneaking him stray bits of antipasti. The kitchen staff seemed to know this mutt and they came out one at a time to pet him, play with him, and nuzzle him. I thought this was all pretty cute, until I remembered that this was the same kitchen staff that, as soon as they finished running their hands through this mutt’s fur, would be preparing my next course. No problem, though. The dog could only have improved the food.
At no point during my visit did I manage to speak any German—partly due to my incompetence, and partly because most of the Germans I met spoke better English than I did. I remember spending a morning wandering the Wochenmarkt in the town square looking for conversation. I wanted to talk about Lichtenberg, but the locals I tried to speak with only wanted to ask me about David Foster Wallace or American politics, both bewildering topics in any language.
My social stumbles seemed apt. Lichtenberg claimed to be more comfortable watching humanity than interacting with it. Spying on the streetscape of Göttingen from his rooms, he would step back from the window when an acquaintance came into view, he said, to save them both the embarrassment of acknowledging each other. In England, Lichtenberg told William Herschel in a letter, he avoided tearooms and balls, and spent his time atop cathedral towers “with a field glass,” at a remove from the passing scene, always spying.
Lichtenberg’s watchfulness was of a piece with his procrastination, and so was his ambivalence. Coolness, emotional distance, a refusal to commit: all relieve us of the need to act. In Lichtenberg, there was both a Romantic inwardness and a scientific objectivity. He was both dreamer and empiricist. No wonder he sometimes didn’t know what he was supposed to do.
Most of us are similarly compounded, dichotomous, conflicted: Tyger and Lamb, hero and schlub, Batman and Bruce Wayne. (A Roz Chast cartoon under the title “The Mind-Body Problem”: A mope slumps on a couch. The mind, in a speech balloon, says, “Get up.” The body says, “No.”)
The multiple sides of our natures sometimes need to battle it out, and while the battle rages, there is nothing for us to do but postpone.
* * *
It makes sense that Lichtenberg is remembered so well in Göttingen, his hometown. Less predictably, he is also revered in Newnan, Georgia, a town about an hour south of Atlanta. Newnan is the world headquarters for the Lichtenbergian Society, a small fellowship of procrastinators who gather regularly to honor the group’s namesake and his habitual dithering. Newnan is also home to the society’s founder, Dale Lyles, a retired teacher and community theater director.
Dale lives in a handsome Craftsman bungalow on a quiet side street just a few blocks from Newnan’s courthouse square, where instead of a figure of Lichtenberg, the requisite monumental Confederate soldier stands sentry. Behind Dale’s house is a backyard labyrinth he built a few years ago, during a period when he was supposed to have been writing an opera. Dale never did get around to writing the opera. Instead, he devoted his energies to his backyard labyrinth and to the adjacent fire pit and shade garden. Today it’s a pleasant, ferny place to spend a spring evening, cocktail in hand. We’ll get to the opera later.
It was in this very backyard that Lyles and his friends formed the Lichtenbergian Society a few years ago. He and a few of his friends from town had gathered for a party marking the winter solstice, which seemed like as good an excuse as any for celebration. They are an imaginative bunch—composers, writers, artists, actors, a professional clown. At that December gathering, during one of their typically earnest, cocktail-fueled fireside discussions about art and philosophy and literary criticism, someone quoted one of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms: “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.” Lyles had never heard of Lichtenberg, but he liked the sound of that aphorism. So he looked Lichtenberg up on Wikipedia. He learned that Lichtenberg was an inspired dabbler, intellectually curious, ready to follow his curiosity from one discipline to another. Here was someone Lyles and his crowd could relate to. Then Lyles read this: “Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination.”
Lyles and his friends, guys brimming with big ideas, but who only sometimes did anything about those ideas, knew about procrastination. It was their bane, and their secret pleasure. That night, Lyles came up with the idea of forming a society to honor Lichtenberg, the Enlightenment’s paragon of delay. They worked out the details. The society would have elected officers and occasional meetings. There would be a charter. There would be cocktails.
Within a week (awfully expedient for a bunch of procrastinators) they had formed the Lichtenbergian Society and adopted a
motto: Cras melior est.
Tomorrow is better.
For their first act, and remembering Lichtenberg’s failure to write the Tom Jones-esque novel he had planned, each of the founding members of the society pledged to compose a few pages of his own bawdy, picaresque novel. But no more than a few pages. No one wanted to be too much of a go-getter about this.
Remarkably, the Lichtenbergians all made good on their pledge. Marc Honea, the society’s newly elected aphorist, wrote a chapter that not only imitated Fielding’s ornate Georgian prose, but also worked in lyrics from “It’s Not Unusual” by the other Tom Jones, the Welsh pop star.
Of all the people I had met so far in my research, Dale Lyles was easily the most tolerant of procrastination. He was, in fact, just generally a really nice guy. The first time I called Dale Lyles on the phone, I interrupted him in the process of baking a batch of Corn Flake Crunchies for new neighbors who had just moved in. This act of kindness impressed me, but there was more forthcoming. Dale not only invited me down to Newnan for a chat, he also offered to gather the Lichtenbergians for a special meeting, solely for my benefit. This meeting happened in the shade and quiet of Lyles’s backyard, where he had assembled an impressive portable bar and was tending a nice fire. The Lichtenbergians were welcoming hosts.
The society exists partly to encourage its members in their creative pursuits and partly to encourage them to procrastinate. Those two ends seem at first glance to be at odds with each other. But there is a certain Lichtenbergian logic at work, as well. Lyles’s gorgeous backyard labyrinth was, for example, one product of the time Lyles spent not writing the opera he was supposed to be writing. Later, when he was supposed to be writing a score for a stage version of Nancy Willard’s children’s book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, he instead wrote that opera he had been putting off earlier. Nothing much came of that opera. He entered it in a competition in Germany, which it did not win. But then again, Lyle says, when he finally did get around to writing the William Blake’s Inn score, he did so with an increased confidence in his abilities as an orchestrator.
“The joke is that task avoidance is good because the world would be a better place if more artists would stop before inflicting their art on others,” Lyles told me that night, as the Lichtenbergians and I sat by the fire. But here was evidence that task-avoidance could also be a kind of task-acceptance.
What I recall about that night were the prayer flags suspended around Dale’s backyard and the chimes sounding. Dale had just made me a second bourbon-and-Tuaca cocktail. I was happy to sit back and listen to the Lichtenbergians talk about education and art and bad art and whether happiness is a worthy personal goal. The Lichtenbergian Society isn’t just a bunch of slackers. It requires some level of effort from its members. According to the charter: “Members are expected, at some point prior to or following their addition to the rolls, to submit a creative work.” But it also requires them to not get too overwrought about it. “In the spirit of the namesake of the SOCIETY, it is not required (or even, in fact, encouraged) that said work be either complete or successful.”
For a Lichtenbergian, dawdling and delay and hesitation are all part of the creative process. Dale had noticed that to put off one thing often involved doing another. He had noticed that this second, unsanctioned thing often turned out to be a more worthy object of attention than the thing you were supposed to be doing. In this sense, it is possible, if you squint hard enough, to see procrastination as an active agent of accomplishment. Inspired, Dale began to write a book about this paradoxical idea.
That kind of initiative might earn him censure from the society.
* * *
Given that procrastination is a nearly universal habit, it is not surprising that every so often batches of procrastinators decide to form societies. And because procrastinators seem to have a fondness for tired jokes, you often see their gathering advertised along these lines: Procrastinator’s Club Meeting—Postponed Until Tomorrow.
Some of these groups are modeled on support programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. They try to help procrastinators overcome the habit. Others celebrate delay unapologetically. An example of the second kind is the Procrastinators’ Club of America, a Philadelphia-based organization founded in 1956 by Les Waas, an advertising executive. Waas, who died in 2016, made a career of writing commercial jingles, composing nearly a thousand of them, for clients that included Holiday Inn and the Ford Motor Company. The best known of these jingles remains the tune he wrote for Mister Softee ice-cream trucks. The company’s trucks still play the song (“today’s best-known ice-cream truck tune,” says The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Vol. 2) as they cruise up and down summer streets in fifteen states.
Waas launched his Procrastinators’ Club as a prank. At a Philadelphia hotel popular with reporters, he put up a sign announcing that the Procrastinators’ Club meeting was delayed. The press demanded to know more about the club, so Waas felt obliged to found it. His official title was acting president. Waas never ascended to the full presidency, he liked to explain, because the committee tasked in 1957 with electing a standing club president had never gotten around to doing so.
Every so often, Waas organized field trips for the club’s members. These excursions were almost always behind schedule. One excursion, in late 1965, went to the New York World’s Fair. Unfortunately, the fair had closed eighteen months earlier. Later in the 1960s, Waas and his club organized antiwar protests. The specific conflict they objected to turned out to be the War of 1812. Waas considered the protests a success because, as he told a reporter, “The war is over now.”
Waas’s Procrastinators’ Club and Lyles’s Lichtenbergian Society are premised on the same jokey and willful subversion of conventional values: punctuality, efficiency, hustle. At annual meetings of the Lichtenbergian Society, members list their creative goals for the year ahead and review their progress on the previous year’s goals. But if a member’s work wins him too much recognition or too many other conventional measures of success, he is subject to censure.
Procrastination is, in one sense, a joke: you are supposed to do something and you don’t; or you don’t do what you are supposed to do when you are supposed to do it; or you do something other than the thing you are supposed to do. This is comedy. It’s funny for the same reason that laughing at a funeral can be funny: because it’s ridiculously inappropriate.
Procrastination is, on the other hand, also the most serious thing imaginable. We have only so much time to work with. Waste it and one day you will find yourself wondering where it all went. That’s serious. It’s so serious that you have to laugh about it to insulate yourself from the seriousness. You recognize that your life is a sequence of moments stacked end on end on one another until you run out of moments. You feel this reckoning weighing on you and know it must be confronted. But you are a procrastinator. The confrontation can wait.
* * *
There are so many ways to rationalize procrastination: it may be a defiant shot across the bow of an overbearing authority or a critique of the prevailing global-capitalist ethic. For writers like De Quincey and Oscar Wilde, procrastination was an element of personal style.
Writers may be the world’s most persistent procrastinators, which is strange because they work in a trade in which the deadline is supposed to be sacrosanct. Author Douglas Adams said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.” When he died in 2001, he was twelve years past the deadline for his last book.
Writers are unmatched at excusing their own sluggishness. Does anyone talk about “accountant’s block”? Does your auto mechanic claim to need a soulful, seaside stroll before getting down to work? Even pacing the floor, that cliché of the creative act, is a kind of postponement. I used to think that when I paced I was summoning big thoughts, getting my mental gears going by putting the physical in motion. But maybe all that ping-ponging back and forth was just a simulacrum of my psychic vacillation, my irresolution: Sho
uld I sit here or sit there? Write this or write that? Should I even be a writer at all? Maybe there is a way for me to make a living that doesn’t require staring at blank paper and blinking cursors.
William Gass spent thirty years on his novel The Tunnel. Rilke had to work around the First World War and his own severe depressions to complete the Duino Elegies over the course of a decade. I’m not trying to directly compare myself to their likes. Rilke’s topics were ontological torment and existential suffering. I have struggled with seven hundred words on cardigan sweaters for GQ. But Rilke knew that some work is done indirectly. “I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity?” he wrote in a letter, presumably in lieu of doing actual work. “Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction.”
This is exactly the kind of magical thinking every procrastinator must master. Inaction isn’t really inaction, but an unseen stirring that leads only later to some useful result. Yes, I suppose I could spend the day in dutiful work, doing what I’m supposed to be doing. But if I instead clean out the pencil drawer—who knows what wonders may result? Can I really afford to spend my day doing mere work?
Some procrastinators blame their habit on perfectionism or fear of failure. The idea is that they can’t do anything until they know they’ll do it just right. Many of us are stalled by the knowledge of our own insuffiency. Mr. Casaubon, the pedant classicist in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, can’t bring himself to cease his laborious preliminary research and launch into the actual writing of his masterwork. Given his working title, “Key to All Mythologies,” readers can only be grateful for his hesitation.
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