Soon

by Andrew Santella

  It wasn’t as if Wright could afford to coast. At the time Kaufmann commissioned his weekend home, Wright had descended into obscurity. Though Wright had come to prominence earlier in the century, he was now pretty much a has-been. Critics derided him. A landmark 1932 architecture show at the Museum of Modern Art had mostly ignored Wright in favor of a new wave of European modernists, including Mies van der Rohe and Gropius and Le Corbusier. Taliesin, Wright’s home and workshop in southwest Wisconsin, was on the cusp of foreclosure. The Depression had severely limited the number of new commissions available to residential architects; not so many people were building fancy new homes. For Wright, then, Fallingwater should have been an opportunity to be seized, a chance for a heroic comeback. The only way to explain the nine months Wright spent not working on Fallingwater is by procrastination’s perverse logic. Nothing was about the only thing that could be done in such a situation.

  * * *

  For all its modernity, for all its of-the-moment Cubist showing-off, Wright’s design for Fallingwater may be most remarkable for the way it makes a bid for timelessness. Kaufmann, the story goes, had expected Wright to design him a weekend home on the banks of Bear Run, but slightly downstream from those falls. He expected to get a place that would give him a view of the falls. Wright, instead, sited the house on the falls, seemingly floating over the falls. The house wrapped itself around bedrock and water, as if wanting to make itself an element of the eternal landscape. The house, in fact, absorbs the landscape, and this creates an aura of permanence, of belonging to the land, that no built work can really aspire to. Buildings eventually fall. Fallingwater itself came so close to collapse in the 1990s that structural engineers had to be called in to shore it up. So much for permanence.

  I had been wanting to go to Fallingwater for so long, had been planning it for so long, that once I got there I hardly knew where to look or what to do. I don’t mean that the house was in any way a disappointment. It’s just that I felt some need to make more of the experience than it actually was. I had seen so many pictures of it that encountering the house itself seemed a little counterfeit. The house seemed an inadequate reproduction of the beautiful photos I had seen in so many architecture books.

  It wasn’t just me. The tour guide had gathered ten or so of us to walk the grounds together and I noticed we all did pretty much the same thing: we stared at the house, hard, almost leaning forward to extract every last bit of significance out of what we were seeing. I would have been embarrassed to say anything as simple or as honest as “This is really beautiful.”

  Architecture does this to people. It is like wine in that way. It encourages a lot of know-it-all posturing and declamation. From men, especially. On our house tour, a retired physician from Virginia went on at some length about his belief that Wright used cork for the walls of one of the bathrooms. A vacationing history teacher couldn’t stop talking about the light.

  Wright himself encouraged this sort of behavior, with his own over-the-top alpha-male salesmanship. Fallingwater was never just a house. It was instead “a great blessing—one of the great blessings to be experienced here on earth.” To Kaufmann, he wrote “I conceived a love of you quite beyond the ordinary relationship of client and Architect. That love gave you Fallingwater. You will never have anything more in your life like it.” Wright was always sending off notes like this. I especially love that he felt the need to capitalize “Architect” but not “client.”

  It’s this nearly religious orientation to architecture that makes visiting a Wright site feel like a pilgrimage. You feel as though you are not so much admiring a beautifully designed home as partaking in a sacrament. And then there’s the simple fact of the remoteness of so many Wright buildings. I drove six hours to get to Fallingwater, which is about as close to a pilgrim’s journey as I’ll ever get. And I’d have to make a similar effort to get to Taliesin, his house in rural southwestern Wisconsin, or his Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois, or his Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. More than any other great architect, Wright made his mark as much in the provinces as in the big cities. Maybe this distance from the usual cultural capitals lends Wright’s most remote buildings a kind of standoffish power. With Fallingwater, Wright talked about besting the European modernists who had surpassed him in prominence. All the more remarkable that he did so in the backwoods of western Pennsylvania. The setting belies Wright’s ambitions and pretensions, his gestures toward the spiritual. After all, one of the last things you pass before turning off the road approaching Fallingwater is an enormous statue of Yogi Bear welcoming RVs into his neighboring Jellystone Park.

  Pilgrimage is a procrastinator’s business in the sense that the pilgrim is undertaking a once-in-a-lifetime trek, one imbued with spiritual import. Pilgrimage by definition can’t be done right away, or on an impulse. That’s not a pilgrimage, that’s a whim. Also, it helps to delay pilgrimage to allow the passage of time to accrue in credit to the object of the pilgrimage. The longer the site has waited for the pilgrim, the deeper the devotion. The older the relic, the better. This is why procrastinators make the best pilgrims.

  * * *

  In my chain hotel off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the morning after my visit to Fallingwater, I was standing in line for my complimentary coffee and stale raisin bread in the breakfast room off the lobby when a man took a place in line next to me and asked, “How was your journey?”

  I was barely awake, had not really counted on having to converse with anyone, and wasn’t at all sure what this man was talking about. Did he mean my journey to Fallingwater? But he couldn’t have known that I had been there. Or did he mean my morning’s journey down from my room to the line for coffee and stale raisin bread? That didn’t seem any more likely. He couldn’t possibly have been referring to any kind of metaphorical journey, could he? Was he asking me how my search for understanding was progressing?

  Confused, I decided to bluff my way through.

  I said, “Good. It was a good journey. How was yours?”

  And the man said, “I’m just glad to be here. It’s a gift to be here and we have to make the most of every day. I believe that sincerely.”

  Now I really had no idea what was happening. I had the feeling, though, that I was about to be asked to join some kind of church, so I grabbed my piece of stale raisin bread and wished the man a good day. Just to be sure, I took my food back to my room.

  What had so unsettled me? Had the man said anything wrong? Could I find any holes in his philosophy? Had I been a little rude?

  I had come to Fallingwater looking for evidence of Wright’s procrastination, but what I found, inevitably, was evidence of my own. I knew I was there as an excuse, to buy time, because I was not yet ready to sit down and write. So in that sense, my journey was a difficult, even lousy one. Because who wants to drive the width of Pennsylvania just to find out how far he will go to avoid the work he should be doing? Here I was eating stale raisin bread on a king-size bed in a Hampton Inn watching SportsCenter with the sound down when I might have been accomplishing something. No wonder I had run from the man I met in line for my stale raisin bread. He and his hotel-lobby philosophy of gratitude put me to shame.

  Wright had his own talent for self-sabotage, which is probably the signal characteristic of any procrastinator. In 1909, having just designed Robie House and Unity Temple, two of his greatest triumphs, he ran off to Europe with the wife of one of his clients. On the verge of the greatness he had worked so tirelessly for, what else was there to do but derail his own ascendant career?

  It is possible that in those nine months before Kaufmann’s surprise visit, Wright might have experienced some kind of creative paralysis brought on by the gravity and urgency of the project facing him—he might have choked, like a relief pitcher brought in with the bases loaded who can’t seem to find the strike zone. He might have procrastinated out of fear that he really wasn’t up to the job. Or he might have procrastinated out of despair at the tatters of his fin
ances and his art-historical reputation. Or maybe there were more and more times when he just couldn’t manage to give a damn about his work. He had tried to civilize the rich bastards. He had tried to bring a little soul to the tawdry carnival of American culture. He had built Robie House and Unity Temple and so much else, and where had any of it got him? The bastards were endlessly complaining about the structural flaws in the buildings he’d made for them. When one called to say that the ceiling Wright designed was leaking on his head during a dinner party, Wright told him to move his chair.

  Or, as with Leonardo, Wright may not have been such a chronic procrastinator after all. The architectural scholar Franklin Toker, in his book Fallingwater Rising, argues that even if Wright had waited until the last minute to commit his plans for the house to paper, his ideas must have been percolating all the while. He must have had the designs in his head. This is something like what I tell my wife when she finds me snoozing on the couch: I may look like I’m taking a nap, but I’m really writing. I’m always writing.

  Wright was certainly an unrivaled self-promoter and his acolytes were always ready to help spread his legend. So it’s revealing that Wright’s apprentices didn’t hesitate to spread the story of his waiting until the last minute to commit the Fallingwater designs to paper. After all, that delay might seem to suggest that the master was irresponsible or even lazy and had to be goaded into work by his hectoring clients. But Wright’s students knew how people like to romanticize the creative process. In daily practice, procrastination can be boring and frustrating, but for a great artist, the habit can be pictured as a kind of muse, just the way madness sometimes is. Procrastinators, like the mad, are wild, rule-breaking, boundary-shattering. What Wright’s apostles—and most of us—find appealing about the Fallingwater legend is that it confirms what we need to have confirmed—that there are people in the world to whom the usual conventions of art and commerce do not apply. Wright, his apprentices would have us know, was one such genius. He was a person who, given a problem to solve, would make his way through the world for some period of time, apparently doing nothing of consequence, but really the entire time creating. And then, as if by magic, at the very moment of crisis, such a person might simply translate his mental conceptions to paper and then, eventually, to stone and steel and glass, all perched over a waterfall in western Pennsylvania.

  * * *

  Most procrastinators don’t experience their habit as heroic. We are frustrated—panicked!!!—by our inability to get anything done. A siege mentality sets in. The novelist Jonathan Franzen told a reporter from the New York Times that he wrote large portions of his best-selling novel The Corrections while wearing a blindfold, earplugs, and earmuffs to block out distractions. He wanted to eliminate the temptation to do anything other than write. For Franzen, those temptations included naps, card games, and “idle fiddling with power tools.”

  Franzen’s account raises some troubling questions. For starters: Is it really possible that an American male of Franzen’s generation would own earmuffs? But also: Are we now more distracted than people ever have been? That has been the consensus, with distraction cast as the enemy to be defeated by centeredness and mindfulness and the laserlike focus of the time budget. The virtual-world distractions that tempt us at work—tweeting, online gambling, fantasy sports, online shopping, porn, Pinterest, clips from last night’s Conan—have inspired a neologism: cyberloafing. It is a bit of jargon as redolent of our age as “scientific shoveling” was of Taylor’s.

  The drive to eliminate such distractions has produced a small industry of software, surveillance technologies, and apps with names like Concentrate! and Think. There is money to be made in protecting ourselves from our impulses. Among the acknowledgments for her novel NW, Zadie Smith thanked the Internet-blocking apps Freedom and SelfControl for helping to free her from distraction.

  The war on distraction predates the Internet, of course. If you have ever killed an afternoon at work biting at clickbait, following one dubious link after another, you probably have come across the story of Hugo Gernsback and his Isolator. Gernsback’s story shows up on a lot of “weird news” sites—just the sort of destination that exists mainly to give us something else to do besides whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing. A writer, editor, and slick businessman, Gernsback launched the magazine Amazing Stories in 1926 and is sometimes called the Father of Science Fiction, although he preferred to call his genre Scientifiction. Between 1913 and 1929, he also edited a magazine called Science and Invention, a forum for tinkerers and amateur experimenters. Procrastinators share Gernsback’s fascination with the future. We believe the future is the best time to do anything we are supposed to be doing now.

  It was in the July 1925 edition of this magazine that he introduced his Isolator, a device to help writers and other mental laborers focus on the task at hand. The Isolator reduces distractions by encasing the user in a helmet something like a deep-sea diver’s, tethered by a hose to an oxygen tank. The helmet shelters the user from outside noise and reduces his field of vision to whatever can be seen through a narrow slit: that is, about one line of text.

  A photo from the magazine shows Gernsback scribbling away in the quietude of the Isolator. At least the photo is said to be of Gernsback; it’s impossible to say who’s beneath the helmet. Whoever it is looks like he has been outfitted for a moon landing, so it is all the more comical that he is doing nothing more adventurous than scribbling away at an office desk.

  Gernsback collected eighty patents for his various inventions, including an electric comb and hairbrush and a device that made it possible to use one’s teeth for hearing. A self-promoter who liked to use a monocle to peruse restaurant menus, Gernsback won some limited fame as a crackpot tinkerer in the American tradition. In 1963 Life magazine called him a “Barnum for the Space Age.” He never patented the Isolator, but his idea anticipated Franzen in his earmuffs and blindfold.

  * * *

  Gernsback in his hazmat-suit-like Isolator, Franzen in his earmuffs: these are images of individuals seeking shelter, as if fending off assault. This is a stance relative to the world that suggests fear and anxiety—and so, is it really a surprise to find it so often in writers?

  It was once possible to think of writers as a special category of procrastinator, in the sense that their workdays and their relationships to editors were different from the relationship of a more conventionally employed person to the boss in the corner office. Putting off work on a long overdue draft of a novel seemed different from waiting until the last minute to write up an agenda for the weekly staff meeting. But the rise of the contract workforce has changed all that. Now entire sections of Brooklyn and Chicago and Portland and Austin are populated almost entirely by loitering freelancers—which is to say procrastinators. When you are free to set your own schedule, you are also free to disregard it completely. When you can work for years without ever meeting your employer, deadline discipline may be hard to maintain. The blithe dereliction characteristic of our contract economy has helped normalize procrastination.

  Yet reading procrastination simply as a symptom of our distracted age seems neither historically nor philosophically accurate. First of all, people have been procrastinating—and hating themselves for it—for centuries. The habit predates not only the Internet but the steam locomotive, the toaster, whatever. So, yes, the Twitter feed may be surging, and the Netflix queue bulging. But procrastinators still have agency. They have options—maybe too many options. The Internet blocker Freedom is so named even though (or exactly because) its purpose is to constrain, to reduce options. Likewise, users of SelfControl are really subcontracting the job of controlling themselves. They have washed their hands of the job. And isn’t it bizarre that when we want to protect ourselves from distraction, we depend on the very devices we find so distracting?

  Distractions are really just choices. Choosing, though, is a bitch. We want more than one thing, but can have only one thing. We want freedom, but freed
om scares the crap out of us. We don’t know ourselves and therefore don’t really know what we want. One self wants one thing; another, something else. One of the most basic splits is between my self at this moment and my self of the future. My self at this moment may want to blow off my obligations; my self of the future will have to reckon with the consequences. Procrastination happens when we have trouble reconciling the competing factions within the parliament of our selves.

  When the war between the selves gets really intense, some self-restraint might be called for. This is why Odysseus, the hero of Greek legend, is name-dropped in so many discussions of distraction and self-control. You remember the story: Needing to resist the song of the Sirens, the dangerous enchantresses whose music lured sailors to their deaths on a rocky coast, Odysseus ordered his crew to bind him to the mast of his ship as they approached the Sirens’ home. He restrained himself from temptation before temptation struck, and his forethought saved him. (What is too often overlooked about the old story is that the self-binding wasn’t Odysseus’s idea. It was suggested to him by Circe, an accomplished temptress herself and thus presumably an authority on how to avoid temptation.) Gernsback’s Isolator suit is one bizarre example of self-binding, directly descended from Odysseus. So is the drug Antabuse, which produces very unpleasant side effects in combination with alcohol, and which some in recovery use to avoid the temptation to drink. It is made by Odyssey Pharmaceuticals.

  It is difficult for me to think about these old Greek stories as anything but tales of rampant procrastination. How else can you explain Odysseus’s tortuous route home after the war, his restless wandering around the Mediterranean world, but as an effort to put off domestication? And his wife, Penelope, is an even more accomplished procrastinator. Back in Ithaca, waiting for her husband’s return, she was besieged by a mob of 108 suitors, each sure that Odysseus was long since dead and each wishing to take his place. (Doesn’t the number recall Albert Ellis’s 100 requests for a date?) Who could blame her if Penelope had had her own doubts about her husband? But her excuse for staving off her suitors was brilliant. She claimed to be weaving a burial shroud for her elderly father-in-law and insisted that there could be no wooing until she completed the job. For three years she weaved the robe, and each night undid the previous day’s work, thus extending the project indefinitely. Her trick has become part of the lore of marital fidelity, but for me it makes her the foremost heroine of procrastination. She demonstrated how delay, cunning, and deception (even self-deception) can be heroic.