Fast and Furious: A reflection on time

Has any period in history felt that it has less time than ours?  That is one of the many significant questions raised in an article by the editors of the journal n+1. It's called "Too Fast, Too Furious."

The great paradox of the modern age (the past 200 years or so) is that, with the development of technology, time is felt as passing more and more quickly. This is what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls an "acceleration society."  Why do labor-saving devices that give us more free time also bring feelings of stress and lack of time?

The answer seems obvious: "The number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large and expands every day with implacable speed," Rosa says. The more "free" time we have, the more busy and enslaved to time we become. No wonder Thoreau remains enduringly popular.

At no time of year, when consumerism is in high gear, does this feeling tend of being overwhelmed by time become more apparent than the present holiday season, which involves doing innumerable things. One important point missing from the n+1 article is our ability to resist doing more things, by choosing to slow down, by not filling up leisure time with more and more apps, tweets, and other devices and gadgets and finding a space for silence.

In other words, it is certainly possible to be, as the article suggests, overly busy and stressed doing many things and feeling, like Tantalus, never satisfied, either intellectually or emotionally. But is it inevitable that we are trapped in this way?

Rosa speaks of a "frenetic standstill" in which "an eternal, unchanging sameness afflicts the age." Yet, with a minimum of imagination and training, one can enter the timeless present, which does not mean bleak affliction (as Rosa suggests) but a sense of constant presence beyond the rush of time. Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, or other, offers a way out of the dilemma Rosa sees as trapping us in an endless cycle of busyness.

Finding time for ourselves, for meditation and reflection, even for quiet reading, requires hard choices (turn off the media, avoid the telephone for a few hours) but seems essential for our inner life.  We can find moments of transcendent stillness and peace in which we are connected to the timeless reality of God.

The advice of Teilhard de Chardin is relevant: allow God "the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete."  Begin, that is, with the recognition that all life on earth is incomplete, that we are restless creatures, and that progress is any area take a very long time. But the goal is ultimately reached, if we "trust in the slow work of God."

There is, in the end, enough time. And if we make time for the timeless presence of God within us, we can, however briefly, step outside the mad rush of time and find the peace we all seek. That, at least, is my hope at this time of Christmas.

When writers don't write

As I finish my first novel, hoping to end the long process sometime next year, I find myself taking breaks, sometimes weeks at a time, when I do no work.  I feel no compulsion to hurry since I have no deadline, no editor or agent breathing down my neck (fortunately). I can take my time and think.

That's what writers have to do. Too often I suspect less experienced writers feel obligated to finish whatever they start as soon as possible, recalling their school assignments or the deadlines in their past. My wife, Lynn, has finally finished a short story that she began more than ten years ago. It needed time. Like me, Lynn thinks about her work off and on all the time.

Like much of our writing, various pieces of fiction sit on the back burner, simmering. We can lift the pot whenever we wish and when we do, we will invariably add, delete, and polish what we find there. Other pieces of writing are on the front burner: a month or two is enough time for them. (Non-fiction tends to require much less time: there are no characters to worry about, fewer descriptive details to add or delete, etc.)

So I was glad to find on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog a piece by Bill Hayes, advising writers not to write: not only can it be good for one's writing, he says, but it can be good for the writer. Some respondents were surprised at this advice, yet it is in keeping with what I have long been telling my students.

A reader responding today to the post by Hayes says, "I can go for months without writing a single word and then suddenly out of the blue I get inspired and write dialogue. . ." He/she reminds us that writing is about thinking: "To feel good about my writing, I have to spend time away from the keyboard and journal. I have to be curious about the things happening around me. . ."

In other words, a piece of writing, of any length, has to breathe. Horace, or one of the other ancient Roman writers, advised letting any manuscript rest for nine years before finishing and publishing it.

That's a bit extreme. But it's true that the overall process cannot be rushed; the creative-thinking activity comes at odd times and places (that's why I have little pads of paper in most rooms of the house since I never know when I will have an idea that I overlooked, a comment I need to add, a description that's missing in my draft of a novel).

To those who face writer's block, I think the advice here about slowing down, enjoying the process, and not feeling pressured to go public with your work would be helpful. Isn't much fear about the writing process based on worry about being able to complete it "on time"?

Being a writer is more than just writing: it becomes part of your life.  Or I should say your "lives"--the real, everyday world of reality around you and the imagined reality of the story you are creating. I know that my work benefits from multiple revisions, each one coming after a suitable hiatus so I can read what I have composed with a fresh perspective.  None of this can be hurried.

Time Travel

How often I wish I had lived in an earlier time, the period depicted in certain films and books. George F. Kennan, the distinguished statesman and ambassador to Russia, is one of those who wished he had lived 50 or 100 years sooner.

"Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them. . . .too many friends to have an real friendships, too many books to know any of them well, and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem more like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception, gone before we have time to consider them."

This elegantly phrased reflection was written, believe it or not, in 1927 yet is especially apt today, when many of us long for silence, solitude, a time away from busyness and hurry. We cannot easily take in the big picture of the present age, with all its many competing narratives. We want to slow down the pace of life.

Those who celebrate Lent at this time of year are reminded to put some time aside for contemplation, closing the door to noise and the endless distractions that prevent us from finding either insight or peace.

Doing Nothing

Summer is the ideal time to do nothing. Italians and other Europeans seem to be able to enjoy their beaches at this time of year with that effortless ease and freedom from guilt that I and many other Americans lack.

Doing nothing is hard, unless you are a cat (cats seem to have been created to do nothing with great poise and skill).

Even though many would say I have a life of leisure as a retired academic and writer, my days are busy, and this generally makes me happy. I am restless and anxious with nothing to do. Is it my German ancestry that tells me a busy person is a happy person, or is the speeded-up, productivity-oriented American culture in which I was raised?

Today, for example, should have been a quiet day for reading and writing, yet, after numerous household duties, including the care and feeding of three cats, I spent an hour on e-mail, not including the revision of a chapter of my forthcoming textbook, The Practical Handbook for Writers, 7th ed.  Luckily, my co-author, Donald Pharr, does the heavy lifting on this revision and relies for me as back-up.

I know I have a graduate student waiting in the wings to send me her second chapter of a dissertation that needs editing.  I also have been working on two forthcoming talks and week-long courses for next winter that require extensive preparation. Then, as "publicity director" for my wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, I spend time promoting her new Kindle book, The Green Road to the Stars.  Some days, it seems, there are not enough hours in the day to accomplish all I want to do.

None of this is a complaint; I am grateful to have these projects. They, along with my reading, are stimulating, a constant source of the growth we all need. Without them, I might be bored, fearing that I will run out of something to do--as if doing is my only reason for being.

What about my spiritual life, about which I have written and spoken?  What about meditation time? I squeeze it in but am eager to return to being busy, even though I realize my level of busy-ness is nothing like most people's in the "real world."

The poet Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books writes of always being a daydreamer and living like the ancient Greeks who had no clocks and so, knowing nothing about hours and minutes, could philosophize all day long. Not unlike cats.

For humans in the 21st century to do nothing well, calmly, requires both practice and patience. To savor the moment and be grateful for each happening in a day: that I can do. Yet, while enjoying being busy, I yearn for more summer daydreaming, more freedom (which I alone can bestow) to do nothing.

Is Anyone Listening?

My wife and I had dinner recently with a couple who talked non-stop, barely stopping to eat, much less to pay attention to us unless we forced our way into the "conversation."

This happens a lot to me. A shared meal should be a relaxed opportunity to be present to one another.  The daily pressure of living should be put aside so that each person can give attention to what is happening in the present, to the person as person who is with us. Otherwise, the get-together, like our recent dinner, is like a therapy session in which the others vent their unconscious anxieties.

Such people are good and loving people who are, for the most part, not arrogant or as self-centered as they seem.  Why have they not learned the basic art of conversation?  I guess because there is so little of it around.

The violence in our society never surprises me, given the pressure and the speed with which most people live.  Even when they sit down to eat, they remain wound-up, unable to put their own agendas aside for ten minutes to take in fully who they are with.

What does it feel like to be listened to fully?  Kay Lindahl asks this question in her book The Sacred Art of Listening.  Her answer: when I am listened to, I am taken seriously, given a chance for my creative inner self to emerge, and so I recall who I really am. It is an empowering experience in a society that does not listen well.

I have used the famous example before of Joshua Bell playing his Stradivarius in the Washington, D.C. Metro some years ago, an experiment to see how many commuters would stop and listen.  Very few did.

I have stopped getting upset at lunch or dinner companions who engage in monologues. I know it is bad for my digestion and blood pressure to want to scream, "But what about me?"  I try to understand how fear governs our lives and that the best-intentioned people often will never be good listeners.

To be fully present to another is a gift of love; how seldom, in the excited rush of daily life, do we realize this?  Slowly down might be a good start toward making us a more listening people.

Is Conversation Dead?

To say that conversation is a declining art does not seem like a new insight; in fact, people have been complaining about the challenge of maintaining a true exchange between two or more people for centuries.

In his history of conversation, Stephen Miller discusses in detail the type of intellectual exchange valued by Hume, Dr. Johnson, Ben Franklin, and others during the 18th century and contrasts this with the often emotional, often angry interchanges that too often characterize conversation today.

He cites my late professor Walter Ong, the Jesuit polymath, who said that conversation means persons communing with persons; his focus was on interiority. Whether such our culture of talking can live up to this ideal is questionable; it was questionable in 1558, when Giovanni Della Casa wrote that good conversationalists are hard to find.

People meet to chat, have lunch, discuss books and hook up in various ways for interpersonal dialogue, yet the result is often one-sided. I think of how many people I have met who give monologues; there is no real exchange. They appear totally wrapped up in their own lives and problems. They pay perfunctory interest in me and my ideas and do not know how to listen.

To listen is an art requiring patience and the humility to put one's ego aside for a while as we focus attention fully on the person speaking, rather than pretending to listen while thinking of ways to respond.  Often this inability to be a good listener is motivated by a desire to "win"--as if conversation were argument. What is also missing in many conversations is politeness, an essential ingredient in true conversation, as Miller shows.

For Miller, conversation has no real purpose except pleasure. It seems to me that its purpose is to stimulate ideas and learn, not to give advice or push an agenda or offer a confession. It requires practice and a certain period of time. It assumes a less hurried pace of life than most of us live today.

Ben Franklin agreed with Hume, Addison and Johnson that the art of pleasing in conversing does not come naturally; like good manners, it must be cultivated. Few of my students know how to have a class discussion; they make a point, when pushed, and don't know how to keep the ball going.  Where are their models?

People, hungry for conversation, turn to talk radio or talk shows on TV, which offer no real conversations at all: they are full of advice and self-promotion.  Or people turn to conversation avoidance devices--cell phones, I-pods, and the rest. No wonder an Amazon reviewer, Miller reports, wrote that "conversation is dead now."*

Miller's book would be a stimulating topic for a real conversation. He covers the waterfront from the classics to Jerry Springer and Eminem. He could say more about the obvious speed of our postmodern lives, making time for real conversation rare; but his intellectual history of what is essentially an intellectual pursuit (stimulation of ideas) is worth reading. And conversing about if you can find a partner who listens.

*I just received an email picturing young people at sports events, museums, beaches, and restaurants and staring at their cell phones.  What Einstein predicted has come true: he feared that technology one day "will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots."
So much for conversation and discussion.