Gotham Diary:
Fretting, Thinking
In the apartment, it is much cooler than I expect it to be, given the heat and the humidity outside; it’s as though the building’s HVAC system has been upgraded (something that I very much doubt). I’m still a prisoner of the bad weather, unwilling to undertake potentially tedious or obtrusive projects — unwilling, even, to sort through the small pile of debris on one of the wing chairs in the blue room. (Meanwhile, where are all my Teach Yourself language books? And my Nederlands dictionary? These used to be easily to hand, but I tucked them away somewhere in the season of household reform and now they are lost.) But although I’m idle, I’m not uncomfortable. I read and I write. Sometimes there is music; often I don’t get round to turning on the Nano of the moment until the middle of the afternoon. I think.
I think, for example, about David Foster Wallace. In the current NYRB, Wyatt Mason writes an almost implacable defense of the late writer’s prose style. Mason spits on the oft-voiced notion that Wallace was prolix or “unedited.” He does not refute it, however. He claims instead that Wallace is an “avant garde writer.” The comment stings with scolding: we had forgotten about the avant garde, hadn’t we? Is it really still possible to be avant garde? Isn’t that like trying to be baroque?
Much of Mason’s argument didn’t engage me, either because I already agreed with it completely (the critique of television), or because the “problem” of David Foster Wallace is one in which sensibility leaches into pathology.
Although it has been said, in the wake of Wallace’s suicide in 2008, that it would be wrong to read his work through the limiting prism of his death, it would be no less wrong were we to evade acknowledging the centrality of depression, addiction, and isolation as subjects in his work.
They say that people get happier once they’re past their fifties, and my own experience certainly bears this out. It seems to me now that I spent my life, up to the age of forty-five or so, fretting. It seemed so at the time, but now the fretfulness seems less like a response to environmental conditions than a faulty setting. I wonder if, one fine day, Scientists will give it a name, a name to list alongside “depression.” It doesn’t matter anymore, because I have survived the disorder (for the most part; as a “no news is bad news” subscriber, I need to know that my loved ones are safe and sound). I enjoy life as I really never used to do, and it soothes for the ticking awareness that I’m not going to be around forever. Am I suggesting that David Foster Wallace might have outlived his depression? I’m not ruling it out. He took his life at an age of maximal self-censure.
I used to think that I had a lot of bad habits, but now I look at it the other way round: my good habits aren’t quite good enough. I have the habit of writing, yes; but I don’t have the habit of writing hard — of forcing myself to follow implications that aren’t, at the moment, appealing. My habit of reading is faulty: I’m a terrible note taker, always jotting down things that turn out to make no sense later while failing to register the passages that will prove to have stuck in my mind. (This is why I never, never write in books.) My scholarship is labored. I would rather net a phrase of sweet precision than grasp a clear idea.
And I am very slow. I’ve always been slow. It might not seem so, because I resist distraction fairly well (especially now that I’m no longer fretting!), but — where did David Foster Wallace find the time to do everything that he did? When I look at my day, from reveille to taps, I have a hard time finding waste — time that would be better spent doing something else. But there’s not enough of it for the (to me) useful things that I’m doing. It is a limitation that, unlike gravity, I have a hard time accepting.
There is one thing that I waste a lot of time on: deciding what to do next. To put it better: deciding which road to travel. The high road of reading and writing? Or the low road of going through the mail and organizing my desk drawer? I can agonize over whether to create a new Nano playlist. Playlists are tedious to compose, but, perhaps because I composed playlists for a living throughout my twenties (in my radio days, when I was the music director of a classical radio station) — playlists that were printed and mailed out to subscribers; playlists that weren’t supposed to be changed — it’s difficult for me to remember that they’re now — now — so easy to edit. So, in my agonized moments, I dither about whether I really ought take on a project that, in fact, is not nearly as demanding as I make it out to be.
I do a lot of that, now I think of it. I expect things to be more difficult than they turn out to be. I suppose that that is a kind of fretting. And what is fretting, but asking wearisome questions? And what, for the matter of that, is thinking, but asking interesting ones?