Getting Things Done
How to isolate the hour?
Presently in my life, I am interested in the art by which things get done. I am interested in action: in my case, in the action that is thinking, or writing; I would like to see things through.
“If someone would but teach me how to isolate the hour,” Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote (I have not quoted him precisely). To dwell in the hour and be worthy of it (as a labourer is worthy of his wages); to do justice to this even fragment of time: that seems to me to be the grandest ambition a man can have.
Is that modest? Is it modest to ask only that I be worthy of this hour and no more? Can I be worthy of more? What would it look like if I could inhabit and be worthy of two hours at a time, because I can’t!
Humility requires that I look no farther than my eyes can see: the lamp is by my feet. Concentration demands that I lock myself in a small, breathable room called the hour. I have no stature for a larger place; I am glad, happy, if I can be worthy of this clean, well-lighted place.
What’s this fascination with the hour?
It leads us back to what I said at the beginning. How do things get done? How does one get through ice and strike fire somewhere in the kingdom of snow? How do things happen?
“I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,” wrote Marge Piercy,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the murk to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.(Those are my italics.)
How does one manage to do what has to be done—“again and again”?
I have been returning to the very thin, inspirational but not exactly (or not fully) wise (as I now understand the word) books I read when I was a teen: Eat that Frog! by Brian Tracy, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, and a while back Talent Is Never Enough.
“If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are.”
The wise pages I turn to are from Abraham Lincoln and Chekhov, both from letters written at about the same time. In January 1851, Lincoln wrote to John D. Johnston, his stepbrother, who requested eighty dollars, refusing to give Johnston money. “You are not lazy, and still you are an idler,” he says of his brother. “I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work in any one day . . . This habit of uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty . . .”
Lincoln made an offer. Johnston should “go to work, ‘tooth and nail,’ for somebody who will give you money for it”; he would double every dollar Johnston made working, so that if he earned a dollar he would have two, and if he earned forty he would get eighty.
Later that year, Johnston was going to sell his land and move to Missouri. The problem, Lincoln said, was not the place; it was Johnston and his idleness. The man says, “If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere. . . Squirming and crawling about from place to place can do no good.”
That has to be one way to get things done—to start right where you are; to be content, you see, with an hour. “How can we make an hour an hour: a round, smooth, well-defined thing that does not go poking into the hour beside it?” Jimenez asks. Keep the hour from squirming and crawling about from place to place; lock yourself in the hour, shift a little when the next comes, and repeat.
The other passage is from a letter Chekhov sent to his brother, Nikolai Chekhov (March 1886). It’s a great passage, one I think every young writer should read. I read it first in secondary school and it was like a whip to my back. My foolishness is still sometimes hurt by it.
Nikolai Chekhov, from the portrait drawn here, appears to be a fool, interested in women, dirty, proud, silly, more interested in making an impression than in doing something impressive with his life. So Chekhov writes to rebuke him and provides a series of “requisites” that “people of culture” must show.
It is quite long, so I can’t quote the whole thing. But here are two:
“If they [cultured people] have done a kopek’s worth of good work they don’t make a hundred rubles’ worth of fuss about it . . .
“If they have talent, they regard it with respect. To it they will sacrifice their repose, women, wine and vanity . . . They are proud of that talent. Because of it they won’t go on drunken sprees . . . Besides, they are fastidious.”
Then Chekhov says, “To educate yourself not to fall below the level of your environment, it is not enough to have read the ‘Pickwick Papers’ or to have memorised the monologue from Faust . . .
“What you need is constant work, day and night, eternal reading, study, will power . . . Every hour is previous.”
So, once a man decides that he will start right from where he is, he must screw his courage to the sticking place. Between the decision to begin and the courage to continue, there lies all the things that have been done, that will be done, that are being done—between the decision to begin and the mercy to continue.
Margy Piercy once again, ladies and gentlemen:
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worthy doing well done
has a shape that satisfies . . . Amen.
In other news, here are some pieces I have done in the past few months:
“The Wrong Kind of Black Poet,” for Compact (a blessing)
“Asserting Shakespeare,” a review of David Womersley’s Thinking Through Shakespeare, for The New Criterion
“The AI Serpent in the Literary Grove,” on the Jamir Nazir / Commonwealth Prize affair, for Compact
“Does Anti-Colonialism Drink Tea? Parsing Jeremy Harding’s Analogue Africa,” a review of a book of cultural essays, for Efiko
We rounded off the Jésùyẹmí Poetry Program a few weeks ago, too. (We are still working on a few exercises.) We give thanks, once again, for those who supported the program. This is the link to the resource we used (poems and essays), for those who expressed interest (and for others who may need it): here.
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