"We are sensitive machines"

we get five good hours, if we're lucky

Last winter, I had a phone call with an old professor. In the decade that’s passed since we first met, he’s become some combination of a friend, colleague, and guru to me. He would hate to be called a guru, but I doubt I’m the only person who thinks of him that way. We’re lucky to have him.

I speak with this friend—let’s call him G—once or twice a month, more often when classes are out of session. Our calls have fallen into a pattern over the years. We trade academic gossip, talk shop about essays and syllabi, mourn our respective last-place fantasy teams. And then I ask, apologetically, for advice. And then he, somehow even more apologetically, gives far better advice than I deserve.

On this call, I told him about my bouts with the Sunday Scaries. My fiancée calls it “seasonal depression,” my graduate school friends call it “burnout,” my analyst calls it “malaise,” and my all-male group-chat of friends from high school call it “being a bitch rn.” I don’t want to dismiss the feelings or give them any more credence than they deserve, so I call them the Sunday Scaries.

I told my friend that the Sunday Scaries had lately been stretching backwards into Saturday and forwards into Monday. One more day and I’d be surrendering the majority of my week to this feeling: unable to write, uninterested in reading, incapable of finding anything worth watching even on my father-in-law’s Criterion subscription. But at the same time unable to sleep, unable to sit still, unable to identify any reasons for the unease. But mostly, I just felt unable to think, unable to follow a single train of thought longer than a few seconds before it dissolved.

G paused for a moment on the other end of the line. In the background, I could hear him slowly, steadily chopping vegetables in his upstate New York kitchen. “It’s not that you can’t think. It’s that you’re struggling to attend to your own thoughts. You’re struggling to attend in general. It’s a problem of attention.”

G has been thinking about attention for as long as I’ve known him. His signature gesture in the classroom is to spend 3 hours on a single poem, usually a sonnet or shorter, on the first day of class. He’s one of the few professors left who takes a hard line against cellphones and laptops at the seminar table. He teaches, every year, a 7-hour course on Friday mornings in which students have to hand in their phones and read silently for hours. It is, I regret to inform you, a pedagogical model that actually works.

So I wasn’t surprised when G brought up attention. I got defensive anyway, of course. But he cut me off before I could take recourse to all those words everyone else in my life had used—depression, malaise, burnout, and so on.

“On our best days, most of us only get about five good hours. Five good hours where we can more or less perform as the serious, thoughtful people we aspire to be. And that’s only if we get a decent night’s sleep and a good breakfast and the exact right amount of caffeine in the morning. Most days it’s more like 2 or 3 hours, if that. Maybe once in a while you get a Wordsworthian epiphany and make it up to 7 or 8. Flaubert hardly ever made it past 90 minutes. Dickinson probably got about one half-hour per day in between chores. Virginia Woolf talked about a room of her own, but once you’re in that room you still need to write.”

“Virginia Woolf learned Russian in 9 months.”

“And she probably did it with 5 good hours a day.”

“What about, like, surgeons?”

“It’s a scary thought, but they probably get 5 good hours a day, too. My point is, you have to protect your time. Especially your good hours. Your time is the only thing in life that’s really yours. And good hours are fragile. We are sensitive machines.”

6 months later, I think G is right about those 5 good hours. I have no scientific proof of it, though I know that Attention Studies is a growing field in psychology and neuroscience. I’m positive that there are dozens of trade books in the world advertising quick fixes to maximize your focus, stay on that grind, eke out another 15 minutes so that you can get better at trading crypto, or whatever. I haven’t read any of them, and I don’t plan on it.

It comes down to discipline. I know that anyone who read a few excerpts of Foucault in college will tell you that “discipline” is a dirty word, but I don’t know what other word to use. It takes discipline for me to not waste my five good hours doom-scrolling on Twitter, rewatching the same 15 movies and shows, or (the grad student special) reading a bunch of third-rate articles that mark the same point over and over again, just to feel like I’m “working.” It takes discipline to not fall into the same ruts over and over again. To teach yourself to want better things, to want in a better way.

I’ve spent half a decade as an analysand, so I’m skeptical of the idea that we can ever exorcise all of our self-destructive impulses. I’m enough of a Marxist to be suspicious of anything that sounds like the Protestant Work Ethic. I’m not talking about the grindset, about biohacking, about anything like that. I’m talking about opening a gap between myself and the endless flood of stimulants and distractions, to take back those five good hours and use them, consciously. Maybe I’m really talking about the working day, or our modern version of it.

Pour faire le vide: idiomatically, “to empty,” but literally “in order to make the void,” to open up a minimal space between oneself and the world, a crack out of which something new can emerge.

The idea behind this blog is somewhere between a gimmick and a spiritual practice. Five good hours, every week, to sit with a single text and write about it. A novella, a poem, a film, a record. Poe said that no piece of writing should take longer than a single sitting to read—about 2 hours, or however long the average American bladder can hold out. This was obviously somewhere between a joke and a provocation, but Henry James almost certainly had Poe on his mind when he said that the novella is the perfect literary form for the very same reason.

I want to center the scene of reading and writing under constraint, and see what can happen in that space, if it’s well-protected. Five good hours.