Soon

by Andrew Santella

  Casaubon is a ridiculous character, which may be another way of saying he stands in for many of us. His habitual avoidance—at once self-protective and self-frustrating—is something most procrastinators would understand. His creator must have understood, too. Eliot has been held up as a heroine of the dilatory artist. She didn’t start writing fiction until her mid-thirties, and had to be nudged ahead by friends, even then.

  But in the literature of indecision, no one has dithered as profoundly as Hamlet, the student prince and ancestor to today’s procrastinating undergraduates. (Is it not fitting that Hamlet’s delay has been the subject of so many English papers written at the last possible minute?) If the old honor code of familial revenge had been good enough for Hamlet, his response to his father’s death would have been automatic. But Hamlet was a new kind of existential hero, which means that before he can do his job—killing the king, in his case—he has to agonize over who he is, what he is here for, the meaning of life, the mysteries of eternity. All of this is inconvenient, but it is what makes him one of us. He is undone by his own free will, by his choices, by his impulsiveness.

  Researchers say that procrastination is just a variety of impulsiveness, a failure to regulate urges and desires. If this is true, Hamlet’s delay is just the flip side of the rashness he displays in killing Polonius. On the other hand: Hamlet’s procrastination has been analyzed and debated for centuries, but does it really need to be explained at all? After all, it’s not all that strange that he hesitates to kill his uncle. What would be strange and disturbing is if he raced to take a life without compunction. For Hamlet, acting—both in the sense of play-acting and in the sense of resolving to move on a difficult decision—is suspect. To act is to play, to pretend. Action is, in this sense, inauthentic. Inaction and procrastination are more likely to contain truth. The martial honor code that vexes Hamlet has no use for ambivalence or conscience or introspection. Like Taylorism, it is absolute in its insistence on “one best way.”

  * * *

  I got my start as a procrastinator the way most of us did, by putting off all the chores—cleaning my room, weeding the garden, taking out the trash—assigned to me as a kid. A child who puts off his chores isn’t just putting off his chores. He is also prolonging his childhood, staving off the responsible life. On Saturday mornings, when I should have been making my bed, I was watching television cartoons. There was Wile E. Coyote eternally pursuing the Road Runner. Even then I sensed that there was something heartbreaking about the idea of a pursuit that never quite ends, a dream never quite realized, an undertaking that can never be completed. There was something heroic about Wile E. Coyote. I also understood that there was something stupid about Wile E. Coyote. You can’t deny the stupidity of a creature who continually blows himself up by lighting a match so he can see in the darkness of a dynamite shed. But the fact of his stupidity didn’t negate his heroism—not even when he stands directly under the falling rock he himself had managed to dislodge from a steep cliff.

  Saturday-morning cartoons were my first encounter with the romance of process. To be on the verge of something is to be endlessly becoming. Possibility never exhausted. I guess this is what makes Wile E. Coyote a romantic hero, in addition to a complete idiot. The beginning of any process may be the most daunting time, but it is also the most hopeful. It’s when we can feel limitless potential. Writers are paralyzed by the prospect of writing something lousy. They fear failing. The good news is that as long as a work remains in formation it might turn out to be brilliant. (Anything is possible.)

  This is one reason that procrastinators don’t like to complete their projects. As long as they are still working on them, they can still aspire to perfection. As soon as you finish a project, it becomes just another well-meaning (but failed) effort by another imperfect creator. The early Gnostic teacher Basilides thought that being itself was a form of degradation; only nonexistence could claim perfection. To bring something into existence, then, is to ruin it. (This may explain why the inspired idea that comes to me on my walk home from the subway usually turns out, when I write it down upon arriving home, to be not very inspired at all.)

  So the procrastinator wants to prolong process. He wants to postpone his story’s climax, because his real aim isn’t to reach his goal but to continue to seek it. The realization of something long dreamed of only depletes the possibilities, caps the limits.

  As long as the process continues, anything can happen. The romance of process gestures toward the eternal. The lovers in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” remain forever and always about to kiss. This is the ultimate deferral, the romance of process frozen in the timelessness of art. “Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve,” the poet tells the lovers. There is no end to their becoming.

  * * *

  On the evening of my visit to Newnan, Georgia, I shared with Dale Lyles my ideas about process and delay and the Grecian urn. It helped that I’d had a few drinks at dinner. Dale had taken me to a burger place called Meat ’N Greet, where I drank, if I’m remembering this correctly, one of their specialty cocktails, the Stinko de Mayo. Later, we walked through the center of Newnan and stopped to check out the monument of the Confederate soldier in the courthouse square and a plaque memorializing the Battle of Brown’s Mill, fought in 1864 just outside Newnan. The battle was the result of a Union raid that sought, among other things, to seize nearby Andersonville Prison and liberate the thirty thousand or so federal troops held prisoner in bestial conditions there. But the raid was bungled, the Union effort frustrated, and the Rebels won the day at Brown’s Mill. The result was another thirteen hundred Union prisoners added to the rolls at Andersonville.

  Andersonville is famously cited in etymologies of the word “deadline.” The word originally referred to a marked perimeter past which no prisoner could venture without risk of being shot. Today the term means something different, but is no less fraught, for procrastinators. The American Civil War also produced one of history’s great procrastinators, the Union general and infamous foot-dragger George McClellan. At the head of Union forces for a little less than a year, McClellan demonstrated an almost religious devotion to preparation and planning. He planned and prepared so much, in fact, that he often never got around to doing the things for which he was preparing and planning. He was reluctant to take the fight to the enemy. This got under the skin of his colleagues. His fellow general Henry Halleck fumed in high style, “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.” President Lincoln was characteristically pithier. He said McClellan had a case of “the slows.”

  The problem wasn’t that McClellan’s army did nothing. The problem was that they did everything but what Lincoln wanted, which was to attack the enemy. Always there was another reconnaissance to be made, more training to be done, more parades to be had. McClellan, like a lot of great generals, was a perfectionist and a control freak. But in his case, perfectionism seems to have masked an insecurity, an interior doubt about his own abilities. The result was endless tinkering, adjusting, reconsidering, and starting over. His meticulous preparation was the military equivalent of a school kid sharpening pencils to avoid writing a book report.

  It occurred to me during my time in Georgia, among all the monuments to Confederate soldiery, that my obsession with procrastination had made everything about the Civil War seem bizarrely, anachronistically psychological: a decision deferred (I’m thinking here of the American Ur-question about what to do about slavery, the one question the Founders couldn’t quite bring themselves to grapple with); an ambivalent body politic, torn schizophrenically in two; self-destructive impulsivity loosed, tragically, on a national scale. The war could be considered a lesson in the costs of procrastination, in which the failure to deal with a problem promptly produces even greater troubles, for an entire republic.

  * * *

  Dale and I, as we walked around the Newnan town square, were talki
ng about the procrastinator’s ability to rationalize his or her habit. McClellan wouldn’t have recognized himself as a procrastinator. He would have seen himself as thorough. And, to be fair, an excess of caution and preparation may be understandable in a person responsible for the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers. McClellan fiercely defended himself and his battlefield dithering all his life, even running for president against his old boss, Lincoln, in 1864. But in fact McClellan was an example of the kind of self-protective procrastinator who finds refuge in the belief that he will be better equipped to handle any particular challenge at some point in the future. That is to say, he was, at least in his own mind, not a procrastinator at all.

  Lichtenberg, on the other hand, never commanded anything but a lecture hall audience. He could afford to be slack. But he also expressed anguish at the opportunities he let pass. Lichtenberg, too, was thorough. He was always planning something big that never quite materialized—like the big picaresque novel in which he was going to “use everything.” So Lichtenberg went in every direction at once, following the trail of his curiosity wherever it led him. The results could be chaotic and confused (see his notebooks) but also luminous (see his notebooks).

  Lichtenberg recognized that his approach was idiosyncratic, and also that, by the conventional scientific standards of the day, it had failed. This is how, late in his life, he summarized his career: “I have covered the way to science like dogs which go for a walk with their masters, backward and forward a hundred times over, and when I arrived I was tired.”

  But even this admission of defeat, in its self-effacing charm, is evidence of Lichtenberg’s victory. Dale Lyles and his friends found in him just what so many others have found—a wit, a skepticism, an elegance of expression that cannot be separated from his habit for delay.

  “I had to find out who this Lichtenberg fellow was,” Dale told me when I asked him about starting his society.

  This, then, must be another reason that the procrastinator postpones. We postpone because we understand that our deferral will somehow connect us to others similarly disposed. In this way, our no will function as a yes.

  I had thought that by flying off to Germany, and later by going to visit Dale Lyles in Georgia, I was cleverly ducking the real work waiting to be done. But already on the flight home from Atlanta, I was making plans for another trip. And from my lofty perspective in seat 11D, Delta flight 2350, a perch higher than the one Lichtenberg never ascended to in the balloon he never launched, it occurred to me that I wasn’t even procrastinating correctly. I was checking off my diversionary travels like some kind of go-getter. In the process of trying to avoid one task, I was in fact completing many other tasks. Even procrastinators can become task-oriented, when the task they are oriented to is procrastinating.

  7

  Therefore Bind Me

  Therefore, take me and bind me to the crosspiece halfway up the mast; bind me as I stand upright with a bond so fast that I cannot possibly break away and lash the rope ends to the mast itself. If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still.

  —Homer, The Odyssey, Book XII, translated by Samuel Butler

  All roads, for me at least, seemed to lead to procrastination, a cliché that became literal truth one day when I got lost driving through western Pennsylvania.

  I was in Pennsylvania looking for Fallingwater, the weekend home Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for a department store magnate named Edgar Kaufmann in the wilds south of Pittsburgh. Fallingwater is one of those structures that inspires reverence in a certain kind of architecture buff. I have never been that kind of architecture buff. Still, I understood the urge to make a pilgrimage there, at least once. Going to Fallingwater is like a pilgrimage in that the place is in the middle of nowhere and getting there takes, if not a spiritual commitment, then at least a willingness to navigate rural roads in a region where the hills render GPS impotent. In this craggy country, you see a lot of front-yard replicas—I assume they’re replicas—of the Ten Commandments, stone tablets serving as lawn ornaments.

  Fallingwater is set in a basin of sandstone and rhododendron on the slope of Laurel Ridge, one of the westernmost wrinkles in the series of mountains that delayed American westward expansion during the colonial era. Driving these hills and valleys on my way to Fallingwater, I could understand how impassable the trackless wilderness must have seemed to, say, an eighteenth-century farmer trying to deliver goods to markets. Something about these hollows and striations was disorienting. And it must not have helped that I was absentmindedly musing on eighteenth-century produce transport as I drove, because I got myself deeply, deeply lost.

  Procrastination, I thought to myself as I drove in circles, is a kind of lost-ness. It is a temporal disorientation, whereas at that moment I was experiencing a geospatial disorientation. I was really lost. The difference, I guess, is that the procrastinator chooses disorientation. Procrastination is really a kind of time travel, then, an attempt to manipulate time by transferring activities from the concrete present to an abstract future. My own procrastination tour was both time travel and plain old geographical travel, though my temporal disorientation was at the moment nothing compared to my geospatial disorientation. I had no idea where I was.

  It was only when I stopped at a Pizza Hut for directions (the exotic dance club/tanning parlor was closed) that I saw how close I was, not only to Fallingwater, but also to old Fort Necessity. This colonial-era stockade, a much cruder structure than the house Wright would design twelve miles away and almost two hundred years later, is important in its own way. It was near Fort Necessity that British and French soldiers in 1754 fought the first battle of the global conflict that would be called the Seven Years’ War. The immediate provocation for this conflict, according to my high school history textbook, had been provided by twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington of the militia of the province of Virginia, who had been sent earlier that year by Virginia’s British governor to chase French forces off the site of what is now Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio River. Both the French and the British understood—as I began to understand during my search for Fallingwater—how difficult this mountainous country was to traverse, and so they wanted to control the river corridors that allowed for more rapid transport through the interior. On their way to Pittsburgh, to secure the riverside site for the British and their colonies, Washington’s forces ambushed a French detachment and killed its commander and thirteen soldiers. Or, as the French saw it, murdered them. War on.

  Washington pretty much bungled that operation. His reputation as a military commander is based instead on his management of the Continental Army, later, in the Revolutionary War. And one of Washington’s greatest successes in that war came about partly due to the procrastination of his opponent. Twelve years after ambushing the French in western Pennsylvania, Washington launched another, more successful surprise attack, on Christmas night in New Jersey. This time he was fighting in the service of the newly independent United States, and again it wasn’t going well. His army was battered, nearly ruined. Needing a victory to survive, Washington gambled everything on a coup de main, beginning with a moonlight crossing of the Delaware River in small boats. Somehow, it worked. The subsequent rout of Hessian troops in Trenton revived Patriot hopes and secured the general’s place among history’s great military leaders. Washington’s victory was made easier by the incompetence of the Hessian commander Johann Rall. The story is that Rall, during a Christmas evening game of cards, had been handed a note detailing the approach of Washington’s troops, as witnessed by local loyalists. Rall, not wanting to be interrupted mid-game, pocketed the note unread, intending to get to it later.

  Now that I had started looking for it, I could find procrastination everywhere, even in textbook American history.

  Back to Fallingwater. It is said that for years guides at Fallingwater told visitors that the land on which the house was built had once been owned by Washington. No evidence supports th
at claim, though. Kaufmann bought the property in 1916 and built a summer camp for his department store employees there, which operated into the 1930s. In a photo from the 1920s, you can see employees in one-piece swimsuits bathing under the waterfall at Bear Run. The fall, the rocks, the riverbed are all recognizable as the same over which Wright’s house now seems to hover, the same land Washington may have once trod.

  I had come looking for Fallingwater (once the good people at Pizza Hut set me on the right path) because Wright was another of the history-making achievers who are sometimes identified as great procrastinators. Wright’s status as dawdler is based on the legend behind his work on Fallingwater. The story of Wright’s delay at Fallingwater has been told and retold so many times that it seems it must be apocryphal. It sounds too good to really be true. Asked by Kaufmann to build a retreat for him and his family along a cascading section of Bear Run, Wright agreed. He then spent the next nine months doing no visible work on the design. This inactivity continued until Kaufmann, the story goes, one day surprised Wright by announcing he would be dropping by his studio to look at the long-promised but never-produced drawings for the house. His bluff called, Wright had to haul ass. A Wright apprentice named Edgar Tafel later wrote in his Years With Frank Lloyd Wright, that Wright, hearing that his client was waiting, “briskly emerged from his office . . . sat down at the table set with the plot plan and started to draw . . . The design just poured out of him. ‘Liliane and E.J. will have tea on the balcony . . . they’ll cross the bridge to walk in the woods . . .’ Pencils being used up as fast as we could sharpen them . . . Erasures, overdrawing, modifying. Flipping sheets back and forth. Then, the bold title across the bottom ‘Fallingwater.’ A house has to have a name.” Taffel’s account suggests that the entire process took maybe two hours.

  I don’t know if that’s a reasonable or even plausible amount of time to produce a design that would stand at the peak of American architectural history, but that’s the official story. It raises the question: Why didn’t Wright just get to work when he was supposed to?