The Foreign Hostile Forces That Made Me Lie Flat

I want to file a formal complaint. Not through any official channel, and not about anything new. I want to complain about a set of historical figures who have been quietly working against my productivity for years, whose corrupting influence I only recently came to understand, and who have been, without my consent, gradually turning me into someone who would rather think slowly about interesting things than work hard at conventional success.

The suspects are all dead. That is, I believe, part of the scheme.

Henry David Thoreau (Concord, Massachusetts, 1817–1862)

Let us begin with the obvious ringleader. In 1845, Thoreau went into the woods, built a small house by a pond, and proceeded to do essentially nothing useful for two years. He grew beans, read books, watched ice form, and wrote long sentences about how much he disliked things moving too fast. His conclusion was that most of what people spend their time doing is not worth doing, and that a person who earns exactly enough to survive, and spends the rest of their time attending to the quality of their attention, is living more fully than one who earns ten times as much and spends it on obligations.

I encountered Walden as a college student on the recommendation of a professor who, in retrospect, was almost certainly one of his accomplices. Thoreau's sentences are annoyingly beautiful. They move at the pace of someone who has nowhere to be. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

The damage was immediate and lasting. It became very difficult, after reading this sentence, to feel that filling out forms was a fully satisfying way to spend the afternoon. The man is a menace.

To live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.

What Thoreau does not tell you is that his mother did his laundry during those two years at the pond. I find this deeply comforting and deeply annoying in equal measure. The principle survives the biography. That is the worst kind of principle.

Emily Dickinson (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1830–1886)

If Thoreau is the intellectual case for slowing down, Dickinson is the emotional one. She barely left her house. She wrote approximately 1,800 poems, published almost none of them, and appears to have been almost entirely uninterested in what the outside world thought of her.

What makes her dangerous is not the scale of her withdrawal but its quality. She was not depressed, not defeated, not hiding from failure. She had simply decided that the interior was more interesting than the exterior, and she proceeded to demonstrate this with 1,800 pieces of evidence. Her poems are the size of a room but feel like the size of the universe. They manage, in eight or twelve lines, to say something about death that you have to spend a week with before you understand it.

The specific poem that did the most damage to my work ethic is one of her smallest. It concerns a fly that buzzes at the moment of death — the mundane intruding on the solemn, the world insisting on its physical reality at exactly the moment you have prepared for transcendence. It is about sixteen words longer than it needs to be and somehow still not long enough. I have read it fifty times and it has not become ordinary. This is, I submit, a form of sabotage.

After Dickinson, any activity that is not this concentrated becomes harder to justify on purely temporal grounds.

Herman Melville (New York, 1819–1891)

Melville wrote about a whale for about 600 pages and in doing so somehow wrote about everything else as well: obsession, capitalism, nature, God, the way institutions deform individual purpose, the romance of useless knowledge, the pleasure of doing one thing past the point of all reasonable sense.

He is technically guilty of the opposite of lying flat — Ahab is one of the great strivers of world literature. But what Melville actually teaches, when you read him carefully, is something more subversive than either striving or lying down. He teaches that the most interesting human activity is not the pursuit of a practical goal but the condition of being completely absorbed in something, for reasons that cannot be fully explained to anyone else.

There is a chapter in Moby-Dick called "Cetology" in which Melville simply classifies whales for about fifteen pages. It is completely unnecessary to the plot. It is the single best thing in the book. The chapter exists because Melville found the question of how to classify whales genuinely interesting, and he couldn't write the book without including it, even though including it serves no narrative function at all.

This chapter has cost me incalculable hours. I now cannot stop myself from following tangents that have no practical application. I am still looking for my own cetology chapter. I blame Melville entirely.

Albert Einstein (Ulm, Württemberg, 1879–1955)

Einstein is the most respectable member of this syndicate, which is what makes him the most insidious. With Thoreau you know you are being corrupted. With Einstein, the corruption is dressed as productivity.

Einstein, famously, had an unimpressive early career. He worked as a patent examiner for seven years. His job was to evaluate other people's mechanical ideas for several hours a day, and during the remaining hours he thought about light and time. In 1905, the year he published four papers that changed the course of physics, he was still the patent examiner. He did not have institutional affiliation, access to a laboratory, a research budget, or a supervisor who believed in him. He had time to think, and he used it.

What Einstein demonstrates — and this is the pernicious part — is that some of the most valuable things a person can do look, from the outside, exactly like lying flat. The patent office years were not wasted years. They were the years during which he was doing the actual work, which was thinking, and which cannot be observed from outside.

This gives tremendous license to anyone who wants to justify their lying flat. "I am not doing nothing. I am being the patent examiner. The papers will come." I have used this argument on myself many more times than I should admit. I blame Einstein personally.

He also said that imagination is more important than knowledge, that if you can't explain something simply you don't understand it, and that the separation between past, present, and future is "only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Every one of these lines is an invitation to stop doing the immediate thing in front of you and think about something much harder and more interesting instead. The man had no regard for deadlines.

The Accumulated Damage

I want to be clear that these individuals have cost me. Not in a way I can quantify, not in opportunities missed or metrics underperformed, but in the specific cost of being unable to fully participate in urgency. After sufficient exposure to Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, and Einstein, a certain kind of speed becomes genuinely difficult to sustain. Not impossible, but expensive. You spend the whole time aware that somewhere inside the deadline is the question of whether the deadline deserves its own urgency.

This is, I recognise, an extremely inconvenient way to be.

It is also, I have come to suspect, one of the things that makes certain kinds of work actually possible — the work that requires you to sit with a problem long enough for the problem to reveal itself, rather than solving what the problem first appears to be. The patent office years. The pond years. The room where no mail arrived.

I am not recommending lying flat. I am filing the complaint on the record. The forces responsible are well-known, long dead, and have by now produced so many accomplices that there is no meaningful way to contain them. Their books remain in circulation. Their ideas remain functional. I read them willingly.

I hold them responsible anyway.