Procrastination, or the artwork of doing the flawed issues at one particularly flawed time, has change into a bugbear of our productivity-obsessed period. Losing sources? All people’s doing it! However losing time? God forbid. Schemes to maintain ourselves in effectivity mode—the rebranding of relaxation into self-care, and of hobbies into aspect hustles—have made procrastinating a tic that individuals are determined to dispel; “life hacks” now govern life. Because the anti-productivity champion Oliver Burkeman as soon as put it, “At this time’s cacophony of anti-procrastination recommendation appears slightly sinister: a refined method of inducing conformity, to get you to do what you ‘ought to’ be doing.” By that measure, the procrastinator is doing one thing revolutionary: utilizing their time with out goal. Take to the barricades, troopers, and once you get there, do completely nothing!
The novel has been sniffily maligned all through its historical past as a very potent automobile for losing time—except, after all, it improves the reader ultimately. (See: the Nineteenth-century development of foolish feminine characters contracting mind rot from studying, which Jane Austen hilariously skewered with Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland.) Which makes Rosalind Brown’s tight, sly debut, Follow, a welcome present for individuals who dither about their dithering. It presents procrastination as an important, life-affirming antidote to the cult of self-discipline, whereas additionally giving the reader a scrumptious textual content with which to whereas away her leisure time.
In Follow, Annabel, a second-year Oxford pupil, wakes lengthy earlier than dawn on a misty Sunday morning “on the worn-out finish of January.” The day holds just one job—to put in writing a paper on Shakespeare’s sonnets—however Annabel is a routinized being and should act accordingly: “The issues she does, she does correctly.” So first she makes herself tea (espresso will rattle her abdomen) and leaves the radiator turned off to maintain the room “chilly and dim and stuffed with quiet.” She settles in with a plan: a morning spent studying and note-taking, a lunch of uncooked veggies, a solo yoga session within the afternoon, writing, a wonderfully timed post-dinner bowel motion. A day, briefly, that’s brimming with potentialities for producing an optimized self. Besides that self retains getting in its personal method: Her thoughts and physique, these dueling forces that alternately seize at our consideration, repeatedly flip her away from Shakespeare. Little or no writing truly takes place in Follow; Annabel’s vaunted self-discipline encounters barrier after barrier. She desires to “thicken her personal focus,” however as a substitute she takes walks, pees, fidgets, ambles down the unkept byways of her thoughts. She procrastinates like a champ.
Brown’s novel elevates procrastination into a necessary act, arguing that these pockets of time between stretches of productiveness are the place residing and creating truly occur. Which makes procrastination one of many final bastions of the artistic thoughts, a technique to silently battle 100 tiny rebellions a day. Screwing round, on the job and in any other case, isn’t simply revenge towards capitalism; it’s a part of the work of residing. And what higher format for analyzing this anarchy than the novel, a kind that’s created by underpaid wandering minds?
Follow is technically a campus novel, but it surely makes way more sense as a complement to the current spate of office fiction that wonders what precisely we’re all doing with our valuable waking weekly hours. Some Millennial novelists, born in an period of prosperity after which launched into maturity simply as the standard signposts of success slid out of attain, have fixated on the office as a supply of our discontent. Many people have been informed in childhood that we will do something we wish, that “in case you love what you do, you’ll by no means work a day in your life.” Work was imagined to be a promised land of success, a spot the place your aptitudes would flourish and—bonus—you’d receives a commission. However no job may stay as much as such a excessive normal. It doesn’t assist {that a} torrent of systemic points—insufficient well being care, drastic hire hikes, underfunding of the humanities—have left members of this technology feeling like they’re dedicating 40-plus hours every week to treading water.
Latest literature has been flush with examples. In Helen Phillips’s The Stunning Bureaucrat, a 20-something spends her workdays getting into inexplicable collection of numbers into “The Database” at a labyrinthine workplace. The job itself seems to be important to humanity, however compensation, explication, and fundamental human dignity aren’t on provide. Halle Butler’s The New Me contains a 30-year-old working as a temp at a design agency, the sort of place populated by ash-blondes in “incomprehensible furry vests.” Her try-hard character retains her from climbing the workplace social ladder, which in flip leaves her pathetically shuffling papers and slipping additional into loneliness, each at work and in her private life. The younger narrator of Hilary Leichter’s barely surreal Momentary takes gigs as a model, a human barnacle, a ghost, and a assassin—however all she actually desires is what she and the opposite temps name “the stability,” an existence wherein work and life really feel benignly predictable. In keeping with these novels, the modern office turns us into machines, chops our mind into disparate bits, and palms our valuable consideration over to the C-suite.
What’s lacking in every of those characters’ lives is the area for rumination, the required lapses our brains have to stay creatively, irrespective of our careers. Brown exquisitely spells out how procrastination is intrinsic to the imaginative course of. Regardless of her professed allegiance to a schedule, Annabel interrupts her personal routine early and infrequently. Simply after waking, she opens a window after which instantly needs she may expertise the sensation of opening it once more: “She desires to know precisely how the chilly blue gentle feels when it begins to seem, she doesn’t need to miss a single element of the gradual daybreak, the reluctant winter morning.” Whereas settled at her desk below a cape-like blue blanket, she spends as a lot time contemplating tips on how to spend her time as she does truly spending it. She imagines her previous tutor advising her to “look away from the textual content and out the window if you need to, try to pause your thoughts on the one factor.” Positive, she jots down occasional adjectives to explain Shakespeare and the thriller lover he courts within the sonnets, however most of Annabel’s focus is within the second, within the rabbit gap of frivolously related reminiscences and notions her mind accesses when it’s drifting off piste. Reasonably than flip her concepts into a piece product, she listens to a robin sing, thinks by way of an unconsummated relationship from the previous 12 months, and fondly recollects her time finding out Virginia Woolf—a author who herself dwelled within the interstices of passing time.
Like Woolf, Brown understands that life is lived within the in-between moments, and that buckling down to supply a bit of artwork doesn’t essentially have the meant impact. (Anybody who has sat at a desk, determined for the phrases to come back, can affirm.) It’s no shock, then, that Annabel admires Woolf, whose churning novels of the thoughts revolve round abnormal actions which can be typically waylaid by characters’ fancies and distractions. Mrs. Dalloway’s occasion planning finally ends up on the again burner as she considers alternate variations of her life; the Ramsay household fails to achieve the tower at Godrevy in To the Lighthouse as a result of their musings intervene; the kids of The Waves spend as a lot time dallying as they do placing on their play. Equally, Follow locations Annabel’s determination making—what to put in writing in regards to the sonnets, whether or not her much-older boyfriend ought to go to her at school—on the identical footing as her daydreams.
What Annabel senses, and Brown superbly drives residence, is that it’s the unusual psychological collisions between the pondering thoughts and the wandering thoughts that yield essentially the most attention-grabbing outcomes. These are the moments when artistry sneaks in unbidden; Annabel understands that if artwork is created out of life, the latter has to have area to occur. She copies out a line from the poetry critic Helen Vendler: “A vital ‘studying’ is the top product of an internalisation so full that the phrase studying just isn’t the proper phrase for what occurs when a textual content is in your thoughts. The textual content is a part of what has made you who you might be.” The artistic life isn’t about doling a self out into totally different parts—it’s about sitting within the stew that a complete life makes and providing your perspective on it.
Annabel’s day turns extraordinary, albeit in small methods. She breaks a treasured brown mug, the one factor she’d rescue in a hearth; this slash by way of her routine nearly makes her cry. She lastly decides whether or not to ask her boyfriend for a weekend, and perhaps invite him deeper into her life. A tragedy within the bed room subsequent door jerks her towards the understanding that every one lives are as sophisticated as her personal. She additionally ends the day with not more than some notes and some phrases on Shakespeare’s poems: “slick — bitter — nimble.” Who’s to say if she’s been productive or not?
The artwork of procrastination requires confrontation—with our inefficiencies, with the attract of straightforward pleasure, with the truth that time will sometime finish for us. However we will soften into it. We will let ourselves float within the in-between. Maybe with a significant, self-aware novel.
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