In Real Time, vol. 10

background work

[Image: John Singer Sargent, “Resting,” c. 1880-1890, courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Open Access Collection/John F. McCrindle Collection. Public domain.]

Do you have the illusion, as I sometimes do, of “not doing anything” when in reality you are consistently—let’s say—reading a long book over several weeks, maybe making a few notes as you go? Or slowly revising something you wrote a long time ago? Or adding 100-ish words a day, give or take some words, to a draft? Why does all this feel like “nothing” to us?

This feeling, I submit, reflects the contemporary bias against leisure and contemplation. Even if we mentally push back against that bias, it still has its outposts in our heads. It lives up in here rent-free. And for some reason we haven’t yet evicted it.

This isn’t our fault, but it is our problem: Mainstream culture values the fast, flashy result over the fruit of steady effort. Public attention spins forward, driven not so much by the hunger for lasting truth as by the craving to look well-informed. Libraries and bookstores (not to mention remainder tables; not to mention our digital feeds) are flooded with the overheated yet under-ripe harvest.

So it’s some comfort to hear how Samuel Johnson, in Rambler 106, swiftly dismantles this skewed system of value:

It is, indeed, the fate of controvertists, even when they contend for
philosophical or theological truth, to be soon laid aside and slighted.
Either the question is decided, and there is no more place for doubt and
opposition; or mankind despair of understanding it, and grow weary of
disturbance, content themselves with quiet ignorance, and refuse to be
harassed with labours which they have no hopes of recompensing with
knowledge.

Here we have a perfect formulation of the familiar problem. It’s almost as if Johnson has been living in our own hypersaturated media culture and has returned to describe it to us. Yet, eerily, he didn’t have to live in our culture to be able to describe it so keenly. His words still speak to us because, quite simply, he knows human nature.

Historical moment doesn’t have much to do with it. Neither does technology, which in this matter is just the means of delivery. The differences between our times are of degree, more than of kind: Then as now, whenever we treat the deepest things shallowly, we get only the truth we deserve. We either make up our minds prematurely, on insufficient evidence, or else we shrug and get used to not knowing—even when knowing is both possible and urgently necessary.

It’s obvious that this state of affairs won’t do, but Johnson doesn’t exactly tell us what to do about it. He tells us what he’s doing about it (“He who has carefully studied human nature, and can well describe it, may with most reason flatter his ambition”—fair enough, Samuel, fair enough).

But we can’t just go out and copy him uncritically, if only because the conditions under which he studied human nature no longer fully obtain. So if we try to replicate his experiment without attending to the differences (of degree and of kind) between his time and ours, we might end up thinking that we’re studying human nature, when we’re really only studying its worst and most distorted aspects.

For more of a sense of direction, I find myself returning to this passage in Joshua Hren’s Contemplative Realism:

To see clearly under such circumstances requires continual attentiveness, continual self-correction, continual communal reference to the visions of others similarly engaged. …

Learning how to see means, in part, learning how to close one’s eyes to so many futile rabbit holes, but it also means learning how to be temperate in appreciating even the beautiful.

Attentiveness, self-correction, communal reference: this doesn’t do my observing for me, but it at least tells me how I can better approach the act of observation. It also quickly puts the limits of certain modalities into perspective. [Most to the point: if I make the common error of thinking that how I see people behaving online represents the best or truest or only measure of the way we live now, I will quickly despair. Instead I have to “close my eyes to … futile rabbit holes” which don’t relate directly to the embodied common life, and I have to “be temperate” even about accepting the glowing visions to which I feel drawn, wherever the pull proves to be only aesthetic.]

But this pursuit, too, might look at times like a species of “doing nothing.” Another way to put this might be that studiositas—the virtue of knowing what it is we really need to know, of learning to distinguish “the specious from the precious”—is necessary background work, not just for the thinker or public intellectual, but also for the (sub)creator. You can’t exactly set it and forget it. It requires regular effort and conscious labor. It takes time.

And yet, studiositas may not have a tangibly measurable component, either—at least not right away, nor in a linear or obvious manner. A poet may have read a hundred volumes to get a feel for how to turn a single line. A fiction writer may need to have a dozen conversations about scene before he suddenly knows what to do with his scene, in this piece, right now. These examples make it sound as though quantity of input is the desideratum. But—in keeping with the idea of temperance—quantity itself might be an obstacle. It might not be any of the ten thousand images the visual artist scrolls past on a screen, but instead the one glimpse of the tree in the distance as she walks, that tells her what to do with her canvas. It might not be any of the two hundred diligently researched books on his shelf, but the serendipitous one that falls into his hands just at the right time, that gives the scholar the key insight around which every other good point he makes can be organized. So a kind of “asceticism of cognition,” in Hren’s terms, is at least equally as necessary as a wide experience, if good art or good culture is to be the outcome.

So if we feel tempted to ask whether studiositas and its related forms of background work are really “productive,” a better question may be: What is it we’re really trying to produce?