I Perished In An Arrogant Self-Reliance Ages Ago

And in that act, a prayer for one more chance went up.

…at times I almost dream
I too have spent a life the sages' way,
And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance
I perished in an arrogant self-reliance
Ages ago; and in that act, a prayer
For one more chance went up so earnest, so
Instinct with better light let in by death,
That life was blotted out—not so completely
But scattered wrecks enough of it remain,
Dim memories, as now, when once more seems
The goal in sight again. All which, indeed,
Is foolish, and only means—the flesh I wear,
The earth I tread, are not more clear to me
Than my belief, explained to you or no.

-Robert Browning, “Paracelsus”

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I’ve been chewing on the above bit of Robert Browning’s poem “Paracelsus” ever since I first heard it recited a few weeks ago in an X-Files episode, one where Mulder learns that he may or may not have lived and died previously on a Civil War battlefield—a revelation that consumes him so completely that he fails to stop a second Jonestown from happening.

The idea is as comforting as it is disturbing: that you might somehow realize at the end just how desperately you’ve done wrong by believing too much in the supremacy of the self, and in doing so give yourself another chance to get it right, even as the old memories of what you were supposed to do become scattered fragments. It calls to mind the desperate prayer of another poem, Jack Gilbert’s “I Imagine The Gods”:

Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

I’m not sure why these ideas felt important to bring up this week beyond the fact that these feel like such hopeless times that it is awfully appealing to think that each of us, or at least those of us who are desperate to make things right, might will another chance at it all into being. I went hiking along the bluffs of Lake Ontario the other day and when I got down to the shore to eat lunch I could see storms out over the water, punctuating the horizon even though it was sunny where I sat. A lot of things these days feel like that felt: that it’s sunny where I’m sitting, but I can see the storm and I’m powerless to do anything about it.

(I don’t want to torture this metaphor too badly because all my life I’ve enjoyed watching storms out over the ocean, and the cozy, breezy, awestruck feelings I get sitting on a screen porch witnessing it all are too important to me to turn into a proxy for something lamentable. But here we are.)

I’ve been struggling to write much lately despite sticking to my self-imposed rule of writing something every day, because the projects I’ve committed myself to outside of this newsletter have been the opposite of inspiring—I just wrapped a 2-month freelance gig writing 110-140-word descriptions of luxury hotels around the world for a travel website, for instance, which has made every single person I’ve told laugh. (The pay was very good, which is one more reason I’m certain this will never be a paid newsletter—writing for money like that fundamentally changes my relationship to what I’m putting on the page and what happens in my brain, and I don’t want this fun thing to feel like that. No disrespect to my very talented friends who charge for their newsletters.)

On the topic of that struggle, and of the talented people I know, my friend Devon Price has written a pair of pieces that really helped me as I tried to make time to write this week’s newsletter. The first, about the methodical anti-inspiration approach to writing, contained a lot that I already knew or suspected but was a useful nudge toward reprioritizing my time. The second, about the concept of “defensive scheduling,” was a revelation.

If you work for an organization where Outlook calendar invites are King, you need to protect your time by blocking out a ton of it. Whatever your regular work duties are — writing, responding to emails, preparing datasets, coding — you need to ensure you actually have enough time during the work day to do it. If you leave your calendar wide open, your day can and will get absolutely consumed by meetings, and your time and precious energy will be wasted.

In a previous essay, I talked about how I make regular “writing meetings” with myself, and put them on my calendar. To all of my colleagues, these writing periods look like any other meeting on my calendar. They are as inflexible and sacrosanct as any meeting I would schedule with another person. They’re just as necessary as the time that’s set aside for my class lectures. If you want to get something done, you schedule time for it — and you don’t let other people encroach on that time.

Obviously this can apply to all sorts of things that matter, not just writing—piano players and watercolorists and labor organizers and protest leaders alike could take a lesson here.

It’s good advice and I’m trying to take it as I sit with a fan on in my teenage bedroom in the limbo I experience each year from late August to late September, when I have a million things I could be doing to get ready for the coming school year but very little desire to do so. Outside it’s that good, bittersweet pre-fall weather. The days are still warm and sunny but in the shade you can feel the first bite of cold that will be the norm in just a few short weeks. I compared the months of summer in my book based on the inevitability of this feeling each year:

I wake up and it’s July. To me July has always been the consummate summer month—not like June, with its weeks of school and responsibility to fight through, and not like August, the last few weeks of which always feel like the death of something. It is just plain summer now, and accordingly the air is hot and thick and still, even in the mountains.

Of course in thinking about this I also had to think about what comes after; accordingly, I wrote this from my campsite on September 1, 2016, and barely edited it before sticking it, too, into the book.

I started this week’s letter with some words from a poet, so I’ll close with some, too. Anne Boyer writes a newsletter that doesn’t come around often but is always a joy to get; a few months back, she wrote one of the only things about this pandemic that I have liked reading, and her most recent offering about her perfect religion was a treat.

If needed, other possible sacraments: 1) sitting under trees, inspecting the veins of leaves, followed by a session of inspecting the branching of branches 2) destroying precious furniture because it is believed that a more precious piece of furniture might be locked within 3) confronting dust, trying to re-engineer it into marble statues of lost gods, and confronting splinters, too, that were once the substance of crosses, and confronting gold coins, that once lived better as rocks 4) holding a seminar, at least every few years, about the shells left behind by cicadas 5) a global conference on a seed.

May we all eventually realize that every gold coin once lived better as a rock. (And RIP to David Graeber, who surely understood this as well.)

Talk to you next week.

-Chuck

PS- If you missed the decadent self-promotion earlier, here’s a handy button where you can find links to all my work, including 3 different marketplaces to get A Good Place For Maniacs: Dispatches From The Pacific Crest Trail as an e-book, as well as all the other places my writing has appeared.