'Praise of Time' by David Brooks

‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ Can I begin like that? It’s risky, and contentious, and will probably come back at me. But it’s no less a stupid comment for all that. In my experience it is usually the ones who say it who are the ones who can’t. Nonetheless, there’s a continual, uneasy relationship between teaching and writing. It seems to me I entered each profession (if that’s what they are) because I had no choice, and the former in part because I thought to enter the latter an outrageous presumption. Except occasionally on tax returns, one did not call oneself a writer. How could one know? That was for others to decide. And so I began to teach, since one had to have some profession. And since that was, anyway, where I had seemed to arrive, ironically because a love of writing had led me to take up any chance to keep studying it. And after only a few years there was this obsession, or disease, of writing. (A disease, I think: logophilia.) And the uneasy tension. And the problem of time, because now I had two professions, and only two if you can’t count relationship, family (and you shouldn’t, and can’t). And the teaching has to take priority because teaching, after all, is teaching, and I love it, and to skimp on it feels always like a personal and moral failure. It also feeds the writer, in more ways than one. And so the writing has to fit into the cracks. It helps to be an insomniac, and to make you one. And my writing, such as it is, bears this out. Short things. Poems. Short fictions. A novel made up of one hundred and fifty small parts. Essays. A Notebook instead of a coherent work of critical theory. A couple of longer, more integrated narratives left abandoned until another leave gives me time. If I’ve discovered, through all this, a kind of philosophy of fragments – and there have been some startling discoveries there – or that there can be a personal science of cracks, there’s also chronic frustration and a continual, chaotic paperstorm (the archaeology of the desk ...) to underline it. Even when there is time – Christmas holidays, study vacations term and semester breaks – there is also, very often, a mandatory lull before the writing returns. An immense pressure of things to be written, maybe, but also this sense that the mind’s fingers have forgotten quite how to hold the pen. And by the time they remember it is Christmas, or time to prepare the new courses. And if there are some times – as I have to admit – some times, when the light pours, when the writing cannot be stopped, whatever occurs about it, you are going to annoy family, aggravate friends, get a reputation for breaking and forgetting things, be accused of losing your hearing. Imagine, then, the joy, the utter, incredible joy – accompanied by its equivalent terror (what if I get there and nothing will come?!) – of time given. Open time. Unmortgaged. Unclaimed. Time in which nothing whatsoever is asked of you but that you do, with your books whatever you feel you most need to do. There are various ways of achieving this, of course. You could be rich. You could seek, as many seem quite happy to do, and if your other life (read lives) permit, a government grant, and put yourself at the dubious mercy, not only of your peers, but of a committee of them. You could find, as some others would seem to have found, a partner (not mine!) so much in awe of your genius that they are prepared to devote their own life to the service of yours. But most of these things are dreams, and not particularly scrupulous ones at that. Or you could do what I did – and my partner (that is how we managed it: turn about) – and seek a fellowship at a writer’s retreat. There are not many of them, but they do exist. And they are not all reserved for ‘new’ or ‘young’ writers. Far from it. The one we stayed at has played host to a number of Australia’s most renowned contemporary writers (and not only Australia’s). And I had three weeks there, in pieces (ten days the first, then five, then six). Well fed, and well nourished with silence, I wrote more, and more intensely, than in any comparable period in my life. A Rolling Column, in one of the few places I could be sure other Australian writers would read, seemed the perfect place to say thank you.

David Brooks

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