It’s Saturday morning, and I’ve sought refuge in my favorite place to write: a café a few blocks from home. Ten years ago, I would have found the infant mewling, the bleats of laughter, the cup clatter, and the chatter way too distracting. But these days, I find them easy to screen out. I relish the mental solitude I can achieve here against a backdrop of buzzing human sociability. But what I value most is the sanctuary the café offers from the supreme distraction of our age: the silent and unceasing cacophony of e-mail.
To judge from the testimony of friends and colleagues, the volume of e-mail we process daily has reached some kind of crisis point. More and more, the medium has become both utterly integral and a major source of exhaustion and disquiet. I don’t know any academics who feel they would become better teachers or intellectuals if they received and sent more e-mail. I hasten to add that I can’t claim to speak from the thick of the phenomenon. I am just a regular 25-to-30-e-mails-a-day guy. They arrive from colleagues, electronic mailing lists, administrators, students, ex-students, publishers, friends, family, and solicitous strangers (some wonderful, others out-and-out crackpots).
But even that moderate amount makes me rail against the merciless immediacy of e-mail, and feel as if I am constantly treading water. How, I wonder, do deans and chairs survive the e-mail tsunamis (80, 90 messages a day?) that crash down on them unceasingly?
Sometimes, one gets an inkling of the frustration at the top. A dean at my university sent a mass mailing accompanied by this appeal: “Do not reply to this e-mail. Please do not say yes, do not say no. Just come if you can” -- thus sparing some administrative assistant carpal-tunnel syndrome from punching the delete button all the way to the hospital.
The distribution of my online affections has undergone a radical reversal. A decade ago, I found the Internet laborious, insubstantial, unenticing.
E-mail, on the other hand, charmed me totally. I adored the frisson, the serendipity, the quick-flaring intimacy. I remember reading W.H. Auden’s line -- “Now he is scattered among a hundred cities” -- and thinking he had no idea just how scattered identity would become. Or how exhilarating that could feel.
However, my romance with e-mail is now on the rocks. E-mail must rank as one of the most time-devouring timesavers of all time. Too often it makes nothing happen -- fast. I don’t say this out of some Luddite sensibility: I’d make a very feeble Luddite. I’ve come to delight in the Internet at large, which appeals to both the hunter-gatherer and the pastoralist browser in me. My research and teaching alike are unthinkable without it. Unlike e-mail, the Internet doesn’t insistently demand responses. It seems less controlling, less of an imposition, and more of a resource. Once upon a time e-mail looked as if it would become an invigorating part of university life. By now, however, it has come to feel like a Sisyphean labor akin to hauling out the garbage or shoveling snow.
E-mail has become efficient to the point of counterefficiency, threatening to overwhelm the primary activities -- teaching, reading, writing, and thinking -- that we once hoped it might help sustain. The best teaching and writing require some professional space within which to give the illusion of inefficiency. It is in this space that we are most likely to be surprised by new ideas or to discover compelling ways to give fresh life to old ones. E-mail’s demands for metronomic efficiency threatens such expanses of “idle” creativity.
At the heart of the problem is e-mail’s paradoxical status. It is and isn’t writing. You bend over the same computer, tapping the same keys, straining the same muscles you use to write your lectures, your articles, your books. But what you’re composing is mostly ephemeral: It’s not writing but meta-writing. A reply to a reply to a reply. The challenge is how to keep a technology with a rodentlike reproductive rate supplementary, not something that overruns our days.
Going to the café is one of my coping strategies. There my computer is reduced to a one-dimensional technology temporarily severed from interactive temptations and distractions. But such trips are a rare luxury. More often, I impose on myself a kind of inverted curfew: I try never to check e-mail before 4 p.m. Like many people, I experience my best energy in the mornings. I try to reserve that dream-inflected, caffeine-charged creativity for the activities that matter most: writing, teaching, reading, and one-on-one meetings with students. It’s all too easy to go online first thing (and then again, and again) and scatter a day’s worth of concentration within an hour or two of breakfast.
Certainly, e-mail can have a lingering seductiveness. Not least because it appears to resolve a central, often painful tension in the life of anyone who writes. As the editor Betsy Lerner puts it in her new book, The Forest for the Trees, “the great paradox of the writer’s life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.” We feel that paradox most acutely when we’re writing books. But even composing lectures demands deferred connection. E-mail seems to resolve the paradox by transforming writing into a quick feedback loop. This is writing on the no-solitude, no-sweat, no-deferral plan.
To move from that mode of expectation back to real writing takes energy and discipline. Writing is hardest when you set out. It usually takes me an hour or two, after my first faltering starts, to enter “the zone.” Historically, writers have used all kinds of ingenious and desperate acts to try to kick start the process -- like John McPhee’s strapping himself into his chair with a seat belt. I’ve made the mistake often enough of using e-mail to kick start me. In my experience, it warms you up for nothing but dispersion; the real writing is less likely to get done.
These days the buzz -- and the money that follows the buzz -- is all about connection. However, if we don’t force ourselves into regular periods of disconnectedness, our students will be shortchanged. Academics have less time than ever to read and write. That’s why intervals of withdrawal remain essential to our jobs as educators. Our task is to redeem information and yeast it, through research, reflection, and passion, into communicable knowledge. “Only connect,” E.M. Forster exhorted his readers 90 years ago, in what became a celebrated liberal mantra. But connecting has become the easy part. Disconnection (in order to connect more deeply later) now requires the greater discipline and resourcefulness.
I wish e-mail were routed through some other apparatus than a computer -- like, say, the DustBuster. That would have two primary advantages. First, we wouldn’t be as prone to equate writing proper with e-mail, writing’s easy surrogate. Second, we wouldn’t have two physically unhealthy activities compressed into one posture. It’s bad enough that writing locks us into a computer stoop. Now we must assume the same stance to absorb the ephemeral communications that used to pass through the telephone. No wonder our deltoid, trapezius, and infraspinatus muscles go into revolt.
I have friends (retirees, artists, writers) who lead more isolated lives than I do, without a matrix of institutional responsibilities. I’m talking about the 5-or-6-e-mails-a-day folk, for whom the medium can still feel like something of a pastime. Often they’ll send me letter-length dispatches: long, witty, eloquent, and intimate. I feel the need, the desire, to respond in kind. But mostly I’m e-mailed out and can’t endure more time filling up boxes on my computer screen. I watch with horror as my friends’ long missives sink into the sedimentary layers of unanswered e-mail, turning into the digital equivalent of anthracite. These days, I’m more likely to respond by picking up the telephone.
This summer, I spent a month at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire. The setup there was my idea of e-mail heaven. Thirty artists shared a single phone link. You had to pack up your computer and hike half a mile to the main residence to plug into it. What I adored was the sheer inconvenience of it all. Going online became a conscious choice, not a facile reflex that could derail your train of thought. I checked my e-mail every three days or so. In between, I could build up a head of steam, without the temptation of logging on for an incidental glance and finding, an hour later, that I was still inside e-mail’s thrall and that the writing zone had fled.
The colony experience reminded me that I don’t want e-mail to disappear. I just need periods in my life when it is less relentless and less convenient.
In moderation, e-mail is a boon. And yes, it can save time. But we’d do well to recall the Buddha’s response on being told that a sprinter had shaved 0.1 seconds off the 100-meter record. “What,” the Buddha inquired, “did she do with the time she saved?” To which I’d add: Write more e-mail?
Rob Nixon is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
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