sunday to tuesday

by Maurice Prendergast

“Well, until Tuesday evening,” was my response to hers “Oh, but you have until Wednesday,” when I said to her on Sunday evening that I have to write an essay for this month and I haven’t written a word yet. As always, finding the imagination necessary for the list of excuses for this lack of effort is easier than avoiding the need for any excuse, but recently the list welcomed the expansion caused by parenting. Being a parent comes with some downsides in the form of total disruption of previously painfully achieved victories of habit, the fact that my former childless self would find hard to believe, even though this same former self was warned by other parents of that fact and was shrugged off without a second thought.

The evidence for the disruption is found in the fact that the gym charge is missing from the bank statements for this month, but also more interestingly, in the absence of notes and drafts created in the morning hours, a previously regular time of day for writing. As I don’t want to stop writing, the only sensible thing left to do is to continue to not write in the mornings and instead switch to writing in the evenings. The difficulty with putting this plan into practice is not the lack of free time, because the baby is asleep in the evening and then a couple of hours can usually be found, but most often the lack of energy. This lack of energy is, as I’ve learned, a companion familiar to a lot of parents, and the full time job commitment definitely, but also unsurprisingly, doesn’t help in that regard.

But, surprisingly, neither does sleeping longer than usual which confirms that advice heard somewhere some time ago: to have energy one needs to create it with movement, with exercise, with anything but being passive and just lying around. Perhaps the reason for the fallacy of thinking that we can have more energy if we lie down a little, sleep a little more, sit on the sofa some more is the mistaken belief that our energy is like battery and we charge it when we don’t move. I think about the kettlebells a lot but they are still collecting dust, and are therefore sharing the destiny of, I’m pretty certain, a big majority of workout gear that was sold worldwide, and which were impossibly difficult to get when they were needed the most, during the crazy times of global pandemic when even the already mentioned gym had another period of missing charges on my bank statement which wasn’t caused by my habit disruptions this time, a publicly mocked fact because that same gym has chosen “we never close” as their tagline. Yes, it seems that the kettlebells won’t lift themselves, just like the energy of the author of this text — it appears that the effort is necessary, just like it is with crafting this text.

It also seems that mornings are simply a better time for writing because the imagination needed for excuses hasn’t woken up properly yet. As time passes the more variables are introduced and there’s always a chance something will not go according to plan. The free evening is not always guaranteed and even when it is there’s always this intrusive thought that one is skipping sleep, one of the most valued things for every parent. There’s also the popular advice that one should create more than one consumes, and as with a lot of popular advice, the exact opposite is true, which is why currently the biggest competition to my writing has been the books I’ve been reading. It was said many times that we learn by doing, that the best way to learn to program is to actually work on the project, that the best way to learn to write is to actually write something, but I think there’s also a lot of value in reading because it helps refine one’s taste.

Speaking of this refinement, I’ve recently read an article from a big shot blogger complaining about the memoir as a bad format in general and while I generally agree with the sentiment that one needs to be careful of not being too self-indulgent and navel-gazy I also think that one needs to be careful of not being too utilitarian, which is the case with the big shot blogger. For example, I can’t find anything more boring to read than a text by some writer trying hard only to be useful. I find thinking less of being useful usually produces something that’s more enjoyable to read.

There’s value in reading bad writing, in reading bad books, because that teaches what should be avoided and that is the biggest value of computer generated writing — because it shows what the most mediocre writing about the topic looks like, but there’s also danger in immersing oneself in too much of it, because the result might be that one’s taste gets calibrated wrongly. Although I agree with Montaigne’s sentiment of quitting books that are not pleasurable to read, even when they come with a lot of prestige attached to them, I also think one should have exposure to what is broadly considered great writing, because it plants into one’s mind the necessary ingredients, even when these ingredients can’t be articulated. “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten”, Emerson wrote, “even so, they have made me.”

This is not to say that my writing has achieved the quality of greatness, far from it, but it has achieved some sort of progress in the direction of what I like to read, which has also progressed over the years. The reading and the writing have always constituted a positive feedback loop, but these recent changes in the scarcity and therefore the value of free time have made it even more clear that reading abundantly to the detriment of writing, with the downside of writing the monthly essay at the absolute latest, was the right choice because it made me feel what will hopefully also be shared by you, my dear readers — a feeling of having read something worth reading.