“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
-- Oscar Wilde
Like many workaholics, I have found it very difficult to do nothing. My therapist used to say, “Try doing nothing.” I’d respond, “Oh, you mean like taking piano lessons?” She’d say, “No, I mean nothing.” And I’d say, “Oh, you mean like taking a walk.” And she’d say, “No, I mean nothing.”
And so it would go. I’m a hyperactive kind of guy who has -- the only word to adequately describe this is inevitably Yiddish -- shpilkes, meaning I can’t sit still, am on pins and needles, have a bee in my bonnet, talk too much, exhaust others with my personal instantiation of Brownian motion.
Because of my hyperactivity, I’ve been what is known in academe as “productive.” Being productive is good in academe, but it also produces resentment in people who may be less compulsive, although they can’t be too resentful, because everyone knows that it’s bad to do nothing when you’re an academic. Doing nothing is the magic inactivity that turns humans into deadwood. Unfortunately, professors who do not write, who only teach their classes, are likened to the desiccated branches of a thriving (or, depending on your school or department, not so thriving) tree. Horticultural and academic traditions demand that deadwood be trimmed, cut up, and burned. If you listen quietly at the administration’s closed doors, you might hear the chain saws revving up and the preliminary striking of matches.
All this usually makes things go well for compulsive, hyperactive workaholics. Academe is the dysfunctional family that enables such behavior. So much the better for the likes of me. But one is only as good as one’s last hyperactive moment. So what happens when a formerly productive faculty member hits the wall and stops writing? What happens when a midcareer crisis pulls up like a drawbridge on a busy thoroughfare and all mental traffic screeches to a halt? Even the suggestion of lack of productivity can produce panic, a sinking despair, a nauseating anomie. But it happens. It’s happening to me right now, paradoxically, as I write this.
It started happening a couple of years ago when I had the first sabbatical in my academic career. Some of you, devoted readers, may in fact remember that mine has been a very strange academic career, in which I was denied tenure at two institutions and ended up being an assistant professor for 20 (count ‘em) years. Consequently, because I never stayed at one institution very long, I never was able to get a sabbatical or time off. So, I had to be productive, in a sink-or-swim world made all the more sinkable by my life-rafting from one university to another.
When I finally swam ashore and got tenure, I had my first sabbatical. At first I was overjoyed to be on terra firma with nothing but time. But one man’s little atoll of time can be another’s desert island. The generally held belief is that you’re not supposed to do nothing on a sabbatical -- at least you’re not supposed to announce that plan to anyone. But, despite the best of intentions, sabbaticals often turn out to be fallow periods in which not much happens. You can console yourself with the British wit Sydney Smith’s advice that, “in a life of study ... every now and then [one needs] to be completely idle -- to do nothing at all.” A nice thought, only universities don’t want to pay you to do that.
But the fault is not so much in our universities as in ourselves. Unfortunately, the very forces that spur you to activity can be the very same ones that lure you astray. You meet the enemy, and as Pogo once said, you realize they are you. In that sense, the sabbatical is more like a serious illness than a holiday cruise. Like an illness, the sabbatical requires leaving your job, spending long hours recuperating, much discussion about the state of your health and the duration of the symptoms, and the ultimate cure, involving return to real, that is to say university-situated, work.
As have many others, I planned a rigorous regime during my sabbatical -- writing in the morning, a midday run, a quick lunch, reading in the afternoon, and so it would go. I would ensure that doing nothing never had a chance to enter my mind. I even decided, knowing myself, that I would simultaneously write a book and train to run a marathon -- so that I could have a good balance of mens sana in corpore sano. I scheduled weekly massages. I figured I’d get depressed by being home all day, so I planned on cultural activities one day a week to keep me motivated. However, after a few excursions to the museum (always alone, since friends inevitably work during the day), I began to settle into the idea that I should just stay home.
I discovered that it was possible to stay home all day and do absolutely nothing. Don’t get the impression that I goofed off. Doing nothing is hard work.
In the morning I helped my wife and kids get to work and to school. My family began to depend on me to do the thousand things that they had been doing in my absence. Time began to be eaten up. I’d return from driving everyone to the subway, and then I would have to clean up in the kitchen, walk the dog, and finally get to my desk.
My desk, normally a friendly and enticing place, began to take on certain menacing powers. First, I noticed that it began to send out force fields designed to repulse me from approaching it. Some mornings, getting to my desk required a heroic effort, as if I were fighting my way through hurricane-force head winds. The second thing my desk would do was offer me distractions, the likes of which Odysseus couldn’t even begin to imagine. Irrelevant books that publishers had sent me would now beckon with siren-like insistence; reading some treatise on classification and its consequences suddenly seemed much more interesting than working on my project on novel theory.
Then of course there was always the postmodern seduction of e-mail. Each day, I would sort through what was becoming a Sisyphean task of replying to all the replies that I had replied to the day before. The fact that one’s e-mail is located by a horrendous coincidence on the very machine one uses to write one’s scholarly work is a piece of irresistible irony. This is like putting the hen in a fox den. Communication pitches its mansion in the place of composition, with the result that major writing functions are cross-connected. Worse, the Internet also sprouts from this very locus. Trying to write a page of prose inevitably leads to a dull moment, or a moment of confusion or weariness, which allows for a flick of the keys and a new screen with endless possibilities -- of buying unwanted products on eBay, checking the weather in places you are never likely to go to, ascertaining the current position of the international space station, or visiting the observatory site of the prime meridian to set your computer clock within one atomic vibration of the correct GMT. (All of which I have done.)
After an hour of checking my e-mail, my morning would become radically foreshortened. I would then have time for about an hour’s worth of work, and then my morning run would beckon. In that hour, I could get something done -- at least if no one called me, or my plants didn’t suddenly seem in great need of watering.
Being a successful academic involves learning how to resist distraction. It’s a rare person who can stay home day after day without going insane or becoming profoundly depressed. Solitary confinement is generally relegated to hardened criminals, so it is ironic that the gift of the sabbatical can turn into something just this side of the death penalty. Distractions are like shafts of sunlight glinting through the prison bars of one’s study.
Thus, even very minor things, normally not remotely interesting, can rise to the level of distraction when one is trying to write. You may not be a tidy person, but given a long chapter waiting to be written, suddenly you may find that the house needs neatening up. You may not be a person who follows the complexities of the currency market, but you may suddenly discover that you will not be able to find mental rest until you ascertain today’s exchange rate between dollars and lire, even though your planned trip to Italy may be months, if not years, away. You may hate cooking, but you will suddenly discover that the recipe in today’s newspaper haunts you until you stop work and rush out to buy the exotic and difficult-to-find ingredients for some new Eritrean delicacy that is becoming de rigueur in all the upscale restaurants.
Let’s not even talk about the bodily distractions -- food, drink, sex, excretion, sleep -- which tug on you as you wrestle with the less corporeal but no less compelling mental temptations.
Fortunately, lunch intervenes in midday to save you from such conflicts. After all, everyone has to eat. And of course all good citizens are required to read every page of The New York Times, not for personal pleasure but to further democracy by being among the elect of the informed citizenry. By reading the Times closely, I discovered the daily pleasures of the obituary page and followed the hilarious exploits of the jet stream and its accompanying warm- and cold-front pals as they wreaked havoc on different parts of the country.
Invariably the dog would need a second walk, and then I might settle down for a quick nap -- what’s the point of a sabbatical if you can’t take a nap? One learns how true it is that laziness is just having the foresight to rest before you are tired. Finally, I’d settle down for about another hour of work in the afternoon, subject of course to the perils of distraction, and by about 4 o’clock it would be time to begin thinking about and preparing dinner for my family.
These instances of doing nothing are merely the treacherous groundwork for the actual conceptual problems of one’s sabbatical project. Being home alone with a project can be like being trapped in a house with a rabid dog. We begin to fear approaching the formerly friendly project, which now seems to be acting strangely threatening. All projects have problems, and the act of writing is an attempt to tame those problems. But, locked in a house with a project, you begin to see the possibility of failure.
In my case, I had signed a contract with a major academic publisher (whom I hope is not reading this) to do a book on a subject that I had previously written about, a subject for which in fact I was “known.” I hoped that my time off would allow me to return to this field, from which I had strayed, and re-establish myself as an authority. However, as I sat trying to generate enthusiasm for this work, it became clear to me that I didn’t want to, could not, bring myself to write with any zeal. Doing nothing -- filling up my days with smaller projects -- seemed like the course of least resistance.
If you’ve been doing your bit for the profession, such small projects abound -- reading dissertations, writing book reviews and letters of recommendation for students and colleagues, vetting projects for presses, conducting tenure reviews. All of these whine for your attention, and make you feel guilty for not doing them. In the meantime, your project just sits and glowers, always able to be put off for the immediate satisfaction of getting things done. You can do a lot of nothing while getting little things done.
When you actually do get down to work, you have to face the eternal dilemma of reading versus writing. I’ve always felt, as a hyperactive academic, that writing seems more like work, while reading seems more like doing nothing. Of course, there is a proportional relation between reading and writing, since the best of the latter seems to go with some of the former. But writing produces pages, something tangible, while reading produces eyestrain and crabbed notes. We get no credit for reading; the main kudos come with publication. No one gets tenure for being well-read.
What have I learned from doing nothing? I’ve come to see that the “indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing,” as Pliny the Younger put it, is paradoxically a necessity for doing something. Fields need to lie fallow; academics need to chew their cud. I got some of my best ideas while loping along the trails in Van Cortlandt Park, training for the New York City Marathon. The trick is to let go of the fear we have that if we start doing nothing we’ll never stop. Paths of indolence do not all lead to the grave.
It helps to remember that the original idea of the sabbatical year came from Mosaic law, which stated that every seven years one had to leave the land and vineyards fallow and release all debtors. That accounts for why the academic sabbatical is given to scholars every seven years. My dictionary says the purpose of the leave is for “study, rest, or travel.” Perhaps we have forgotten the rest and travel part. As for debtors, we should probably relieve ourselves from the debt of work. We need to allow ourselves to rest, to idle what my friend calls “the should-must machine.” When we can do that, we see that the virtues of doing nothing are something indeed.
Lennard J. Davis is head of the English department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book is The Sonnets: A Novel (State University of New York Press, 2001).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B12
