Life is a Waiting Room
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne fell off a horse when he was 36. That’s the same age as me, but Montaigne wasn’t to know this at the time. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre (cf. Wikipedia). He liked to ride his horse about to take his mind off the quotidian concerns of managing his estate. As he fell both from his horse and unconscious, he thought he’d been shot.
“There lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log.”
He hadn’t been shot. A servant had rushed past on a more muscular horse, knocking Montaigne’s placid steed to the ground. (Bloody servants.) On waking, he realised that he hadn’t been shot and wasn’t dead. He was probably very pleased about this. And, after his head had cleared and he’d stopped vomiting blood, this near-death experience taught him the answer to life:
“Don’t worry about death became his fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live,” says Sarah Bakewell in her biography of him.
Now morbidity, or worrying about death, is the elder, more intense, brother of waiting for The Awl to respond to your great idea about an essay describing the differences between late night travel in London and New York. Really. Obsessing about the future must be due to (latent) awareness of the meaningless of it all, a grasping searching for truth in the quotidian. Falling off a horse taught Montaigne the baselessness of all this. Living in the moment (for all things will pass) was one of Montaigne’s solutions to the fear of death. But he never once submitted a great idea for an article about dogs to Vice. As far as we know.
Newly popular in schools is ‘mindfulness’ training. Kids are told to hold a raisin in their hand and asked to think of nothing but the raisin. They find it difficult, even when distractions such as Garbage Pail Kids trading cards or whatever the modern equivalent may be — Tamagotchi, have been taken away.
Writers are kids — they’re emotionally volatile, reactive, tiny (Jonathan Franzen barely scapes five foot)— so it’s equally impossible for them to focus on the raisin/live in the moment. Especially if, like me, their creative musings are constantly interrupted by tweets/emails/DMs from adoring fans. (Note — there’s an alarming lack of self-censorship among the college girls of North America.)You may get close when you’re Microsoft Wording in your suburban Starbucks but even then you’re considering what next word to use and whether the barista is staring because of your lack of coffee or because she’s impressed you’re a writer.
There’s no torture like waiting. They use it in South American prisons. One episode of the hit TV series Narcos documents the procedure in chilling detail. They, the South Americans, call it ‘las torturas de espera’ or ‘the waiting torture’. Inmates are asked if they want something. If they say ‘yes’, they are forced to wait for it. Sometimes for hours.
The waiting: you email your piece to an editor, an agent, a competition. If you are young and have dreams, you may submit to a print magazine. And you wait for the response. And you continue waiting. Every new chime of incoming email may well be the New Yorker, apologising for the seven long months it’s taken to reply and letting you know that Ian Frazier himself thought your ‘clickbait descriptions of literary works’ to be hi-larious and would you be interested in signing as a staff writer?
But every new email is inevitably from the artisanal cheese mailing list for which you accidentally signed up three years ago and you swear you unsubscribed the last time it arrived. And the time before. The New Yorker, or whoever, never replies. At least, not in the way you imagine during the sleepless, sultry nights of South London.
If you choose the instant hit of posting to Medium, you’re cursed to anticipate the number of reads and recommends because this essay may be the one. There’s a finite combination of words and sentences. The odds dictate that with suffcient endurance you will one day hit upon the winning formula. All you need do is send this fresh essay, a poem about a dog, for instance, out into the world (SoCal) at the right time, choose an irresistible title and a beautiful picture header — maybe a chick in a bikini — and you will harvest a field-full of recommends. When I click publish, I think ‘that’s a tenner’ or ‘three-figures, no problem’ and I usually over-estimate by 100%.
(For the record, I think this post, if turned down by the New Yorker and so posted to Medium, will attract 13 recommends. Readers are beginning to tire of meta Medium posts about Medium. Real writers don’t write about writing as real readers don’t read about reading. Also — it’s not a humourous description of the tech industry, so will struggle for recommends due to that fault.)
All this worrying, all this distraction from the raisin: it’s bad for your health. Already I drink too much. If I were a successful writer who got paid money to pump out this shit (the very thought!), I’d be two stone lighter and would wake each fresh day with a clear head. And even if I didn’t, I’d drink better quality booze.
But, regardless of knowing all of the above or the quantity/quality of red wine consumed or, fuck, even being the father to a beautiful, talented son (there’s a whole other essay to be written about how parenthood both encourages the glory of existing in the moment with your child but also provokes deep anxiety about all the terrible things that might befall the kid in the future), I continue to crave … an extra recommend, a mention by the @Medium Twitter account, a publisher. Your man Socrates knew desire to be a dangerous thing. And, as the Buddhists constantly bang on, it’s only through eliminating craving that one can achieve Nirvana. Or publication by McSweeney’s.
If writing leads to craving, the path to happiness, therefore, begins by not writing. ‘Words, words, words,’ says Hamlet (Benedict Cumberbatch) when asked what he’s reading. And (spoiler) when Hamlet dies, having fallen for the poisoned sword trick, his last words are ‘the rest is silence’.
Reader, I think he might be on to something. And it’s worth noting too that it was red wine that killed his mum. Writing & booze — the dual harbingers of death. And there wasn’t even the Internet in 17th Century Denmark. If there had been, Hamlet could have used Ask.fm or Yahoo Answers to see if he should kill his stepfather.
My solution? To join Instagram and focus on photography instead.
