* * *
Every year I put off getting a flu shot. Since I would prefer not to come down with the flu, this makes no sense. The problem is that shots are unpleasant and doctors’ offices are even more unpleasant, so things get complicated. Getting a flu shot should be a simple thing, but any procrastinator who thinks about it long enough can make it a very complicated thing. A dilemma. Why do I put off my flu shot? Partly it’s a matter of language. It’s called a shot, and so it inspires fear. It becomes something to be dodged. This is one of the skills any procrastinator picks up—the ability to postpone an action by dithering, which dithering itself often produces rationalizations (however flimsy) to justify further inaction.
This is sometimes called overthinking, but that’s too self-congratulatory, if you ask me. It makes it sound as if the procrastinator’s problem is really his unstoppable mental prowess, which cannot be harnessed and so runs away with itself. Dithering is just a rerouting of one’s thinking, away from action and toward inaction. Spend enough time thinking about things and you may not have to do any of them. All health care can be seen as a form of procrastination, I tell myself. Its object is to postpone a perfectly natural process—in this case, death. Maybe the people lined up for flu shots are the real procrastinators.
Healing is itself paradoxical. Doctors cut into us, they drug us, they invade our bodies, all in the name of health. We submit to regimens of pain and violence for the sake of long life. To be a patient is to be impatient—not just with the hours in the reception rooms, not just with the wait for test results, but with the loss of control of our own lives that we all experience as part of being doctored. Are we ever more aware of our own bodies than we are while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room? Even the most routine checkup is disorienting, a break in the regulating logic of daily life. My competencies and facilities, my assets and education mean nothing once the doctor tells me to strip. Even before illness disarms us, the routines of health care expose us as vulnerable. How do I tie this paper robe? Where do I look when the doctor’s hands start to probe?
Illness, too, is a postponement, an interim state. It is a recess from the everyday, something every schoolkid who has ever faked the flu to avoid an exam knows. This deception was something I never had much success with as a kid, which maybe in retrospect helps explain my adult tendency to procrastinate. Am I still trying to call a halt to the proceedings, to defy the governing schedule of my life? Healthy kids will feign coughs and sore throats not just because they’re unready for the spelling test, but because they’re attracted to the disorientation and novelty of illness. They find in illness a gratifying release from the mundane. Sitting on a couch at home watching TV and playing video games may be nothing special in itself, but as a break from the daily schedule of homeroom, science, and study hall it’s delicious. Kids romanticize illness in exactly the way Susan Sontag warned against in Illness as Metaphor. Illness makes you interesting.
Tuberculosis was once so strongly associated with creativity that when medicine began to control the disease, critics feared for the impact on literature. Sontag quotes Byron admiring his own pallor and wishing to die of consumption: “Because the ladies would all say, ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.’”
The kid home sick from school senses his specialness, too. Who can blame him? Illness—even a bogus cold—transforms you. When you stay home from school, you become a presence in the classroom in a way that you never could be if you were actually there. People worry about you. Your friends deliver your homework to you at home.
One of the clichés of biography is the catastrophic injury or illness that changes or in retrospect explains a life. Theodore Roosevelt’s youthful asthma, Franklin Roosevelt’s polio, Beethoven’s deafness, St. Ignatius’s encounter with a cannonball at the Battle of Pamplona. Before Jack Kerouac became famous as the official novelist of the Beat generation, he was a speedy fullback for his high-school football team in Lowell, Massachusetts. A sports-crazy kid, he dreamed of starring in the Rose Bowl or winning the world heavyweight title. He settled for a spot on the freshman team at Columbia University. In his first game, against St. Benedict’s Prep of New Jersey, he broke his leg returning a punt. His coaches had doubts about the severity of Kerouac’s injury and accused him of “malingering.” I picture the incipient hipster lounging around the locker room with his pipe, admonishing the jocks that their sweaty efforts were a waste of karmic energy. “Scrimmage, my ass,” he wrote in the voice of his alter ego, Jack Duluoz, in the novel Visions of Cody. “I’m gonna sit here in this room and dig Beethoven, I’m gonna write noble words.”
Even after his recovery, Kerouac continued to clash with his coaches. (Are you surprised?) Sometime during or after his second season, he decided to leave the team and the university. It was the beginning of a lifelong pattern of quitting. Kerouac quit college twice, failed to complete basic training after joining the navy in 1942, and left the merchant marine after three months. He worked as a ship’s hand, a sportswriter, a waiter, and in many other jobs, but he never held one for very long. He told the navy that his work history was so “scant” because he had “spent much time studying.” The navy told him to hit the road in 1943, discharging him as “unsuitable.” The Beat lifestyle for which Kerouac became a mascot could be read as nothing but an extended procrastination.
There may be two kinds of procrastinators: those who can’t finish what they start (like Keroucac) and those who can’t get started in the first place (the Wright of the Falllingwater last-second design legend). Fallingwater rescued Wright’s career. He had been thought a washed-up anachronism. Fallingwater made him once again a homegrown American master. Big commissions began coming his way once more. In 1943 Wright took on the design of a new art museum for Solomon Guggenheim in New York City. It wasn’t completed for another sixteen years—not because Wright dithered, but because a world war intervened and local opponents had to be overcome.
Wright never did see the Guggenheim complete. He died a few months before the museum opened, of complications from emergency surgery to remove a blockage in his intestines. One of his doctors told reporters, “He was getting along satisfactorily, and then suddenly died.” He was ninety-one, which, let’s be honest, is awfully old for sudden death.
At the Guggenheim, Wright placed the museum’s exhibition space along a spiral ramp, one-third of a mile long and six stories high, that corkscrews around a skylight-topped atrium. For Wright, the spiral was an image of aspiration and transcendence. On the other hand, the ramp at the Guggenheim works just as well in the other direction. It winds down; it dwindles. Either way the path is roundabout, like the epic hero’s (or like water going down a drain). The procrastinator’s path is never a beeline, either. You turn away from one thing and toward another, and then back again a few more times. You make only gradual progress. You trust that knowledge can be won and desire satisfied by not seeking either.
8
Not Yet
Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.
—Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
Some of the roads that chamfer across Kent not far from Charles Darwin’s Down House date to the Roman occupation of Britain. By the time Darwin arrived in the 1840s, these roads already qualified as narrow. They could barely accommodate his horse and buggy. They are no wider now. When I went to Kent to visit the house, I had the idea of having Dmetir, the Bulgarian Uber driver who had given me a ride out from London, drop me a half mile away, so I could spend some time walking the country lanes. I imagined myself strolling in imitation of the great man, who had spent so many early mornings wandering the same landscape.
It was a ridiculously scenic walk: meadows still a brilliant green in mid-November. Charming cottages, stone walls lining the roads. Mists and mellow fruitfulness. But at one particularly sharp turn in the narrow lane, I was almost pinned to one of those charming roadside walls by a speeding Land Rover. I tried to think of it as a lesson in Dar
winian struggle. In nature’s competition for scarce resources (space on a narrow road), the fittest (Land Rovers) will always prevail over the less fit (me).
I had been encountering signs of Darwin’s influence ever since I got off the plane at Heathrow and collected a ten-pound note as change for the coffee I’d bought. The great man’s picture was on the back of the bill, opposite the queen’s. In one corner of the bill was a representation of Darwin’s magnifying glass, an apt image for someone whose contributions mostly arose from noticing the small stuff and translating those observations into big ideas.
After Darwin wobbled off the Beagle in 1836, he never held a job. He never again left England. He mostly stayed at home and wrote and worried and walked. His house was also his field station, his lab, his library. (He chose the place, in part, because of its soil composition and its biogeographic diversity. I imagine him in conversation with his real estate agent: Three bathrooms would be nice, but what I really want is some calciferous soil.)
Once he had settled in, Darwin seemed to be fixed there like a barnacle on the bottom of a boat. He got down to work, in his own way. He grew orchids and primroses. He cultivated insectivorous plants and tested the limits of their diet by offering them nail clippings. He cleared a bare, two-by-three-foot weed patch, taking copious notes of which windblown, weedy seedlings took root and thrived and which did not. And he dissected barnacles.
Darwin spent eight years working on barnacles at Down House. Eight crucial years in his intellectual prime. That was a little much even for him. He grew tired of the little things. “I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before,” he complained to a friend. He confronted the possibility that he was devoting too many years to his fascination with barnacles. It was during those eight years with the barnacles that another naturalist, Alfred Wallace, started thinking along the same evolutionary lines that Darwin had been thinking for decades, thus threatening Darwin’s claim to scientific priority. The barnacles, in that sense, nearly cost him his place among the greats of science. He might never have made it to the back of the ten-pound note.
After he learned of Wallace’s work, Darwin wrote to a friend who had long warned him against delaying: “Your words have come true with a vengeance.”
On the other hand, the barnacles taught him a few things. Barnacle-dom contains endless variety—legless species, species of indeterminate sexuality, anus-less species. It is just these sorts of small variations that provide the basis of natural selection. The paper Darwin intended to write when he first started cutting into barnacles became, over time, four volumes. And in 1853 those volumes won him a Royal Medal for Natural Science, an honor that carried with it considerable intellectual cred within the science establishment. That honor may have given Darwin the courage and confidence to finally move forward with the Origin of Species.
* * *
Rowan Blaik, the head gardener at Down House, lived on the grounds of the estate, working among the trees and hedges and lawns that Darwin loved. When Rowan told me about his living arrangements, I said that it sounded to me like a pretty romantic life, though I wasn’t really considering the actual physical labor and stooping involved. I think gardens are most glorious when you don’t actually have to garden.
Wherever I went in Darwin’s garden, I was aware that the great naturalist had walked there, too, and had seen pretty much the same things I was seeing. The garden was something like a natural library for Darwin, a place where he went to seek answers. I noticed that as I was walking around the place, I had crossed my hands behind me, something I never otherwise do, and walked with my head slightly bowed, as if in deep thought. I suppose I imagined this was how Victorian gentleman scientists walked when deep in thought, though I don’t know much about Victorian gentleman scientists—or about deep thought, for that matter.
“Whenever Darwin faced a problem, he walked,” Blaik told me as he showed me the grounds. Given how much walking Darwin did, this suggests his life was one big problem. If he couldn’t work out a quandary in ten laps around the garden, Darwin figured he might not be able to solve it at all. Blaik told me that at the end of Darwin’s life, when the scientist was too enfeebled to get around on his own, he was wheeled around the gardens. It was unthinkable for Darwin to miss his walk, even when he couldn’t walk.
Darwin always proceeded clockwise around his garden path, so Blaik and I went clockwise, too. He showed me the trees Darwin planted and the view across the Kent Downs to the Surrey Hills. Black clouds were hanging over the distant hills, sun and shadow making a patchwork on the lowlands. From Darwin’s house you can access one of the public right-of-ways that crisscross England and Wales, and I thought how marvelous it would be to walk across all of Kent—hell, why not all of England?—following these paths.
I was still in mid-reverie when the rain let loose. A real downpour. No more mists, no more mellow fruitfulness now, just sheets of precipitation. Blaik suggested we take cover in Darwin’s greenhouse, so we did. It was quite a thing to be able to use one of the landmarks of the history of botany like a conveniently placed bus-stop shelter. We waited there among the orchids, and Blaik filled the time trying to educate me about Darwin. The rain was hammering on the greenhouse panes. I wondered if Darwin ever loitered in the greenhouse, listening to the same sound on similarly stormy days. Probably not, I decided. Blaik had told me that Darwin liked to divide his day into fifteen-minute segments. This, I suppose, is how he managed to publish as much as he did. For a supposed procrastinator, Darwin was awfully disciplined.
* * *
Is it possible to make a case for procrastination? A defense of procrastination would be like one of those counterintuitive stories that newspaper science and health editors love, whereby some habit—eating red meat, drinking wine—previously thought to be toxic is shown to actually be good for you.
In ancient Greek, a prepared speech made in defense of someone, as when trying to clear someone of a charge in a legal case, was called an apologia. The modern apology, though, has flipped that meaning. Today, when we apologize, we admit error. We plead guilty. I came around to thinking of this book as both apology and apologia, confession and argument. I wanted to defend myself, justify my procrastination, even while owning up to my own guilt.
The knob on my apartment’s front door has been wobbly for a while now. It feels like if you gave it a good enough yank, it might come off in your hand. I have learned, and the rest of the family has learned, to not give it such a yank. So we coddle the doorknob, gently, gently, and it gives us no further trouble. So far, so good.
Just fix the damn doorknob, someone might suggest.
Would it make a difference if I confessed that I have been telling myself this for a while? Fixing the damn doorknob has become a semipermanent fixture on my to-do lists. I consult these lists every so often and am reminded of the need to fix the damn doorknob. But I haven’t yet acted on that need.
What’s the worst that could happen as a result of my delay? I can imagine pulling the doorknob clear off the door and as a result being trapped in the apartment with no way to get out, save calling a locksmith or something. That would be embarrassing. But the prospect isn’t embarrassing enough to compel me to act now. The need isn’t pressing. The doorknob has been wobbly for a while now and I’ve been getting along fine. No rush.
Nor is there any urgency to the need to schedule a dentist’s appointment or renew the car registration or clean the furnace filter or to finally change the kitchen clock from standard to daylight savings. Or is it from daylight savings to standard? I can never keep the two straight. The change, whichever it is, happened weeks ago. Since then I’ve just been mentally adding an hour to whatever I see displayed on the clock in the apartment. Or have I been subtracting?
What bothers me about my procrastination is that I am not doing what some ideal version of me believes he should be doing. It bothered Lichtenberg, too, and Leonardo and so many of the Great Procrastinators. Leonardo is supposed to have reproach
ed himself on his deathbed: “All I have left undone!” The lesson of the Leonardo story is supposed to be that if we don’t tend to our business promptly, we will regret it in the end.
If the Great Procrastinators taught me anything, it is that so many of the things we want to do are really, really hard: learning another language. Getting to work on the project we’ve been dreading. Speaking to the woman we would like to meet. These things put us in an uncomfortable place: risking failure, pain, embarrassment. And even when the things we have to do aren’t all that hard, the temptation remains to put off doing them, and so make those tasks more difficult, more challenging, and therefore more interesting. Which may be another reason procrastinators think that instead of tackling the task at hand, it would be a better idea to reorganize the closet or rename all their Spotify playlists or spend another decade on that barnacle research.
Science says that if we don’t do something very soon to halt the damage we’re doing to our world, that world will be doomed and us with it. But most of us seem to care more about the concrete present than an abstract future. Most of us would like to postpone the reckoning: Repent, change your ways, before it is too late. If you don’t, you will regret it.
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