My day ends at five – Henry delighted, my brain depleted. I’ll have been writing since eight at a rate of about two hundred words an hour (including respites to eat, browse, and nap). Between fifteen hundred and two thousand words is as much as I can manage in a day. Trollope wrote at a rate of a thousand words an hour – and he wrote well – how, I have no idea – I can barely type that fast.
At five, Henry is ready for our walk. We have two regular walking routes – one thirty minutes, the other forty-five. Henry travels at least four times the distance I do, zigzagging, sniffing, chasing, this way and that. I envy him the intoxicating interest of his world, which he explores principally with his nose. My world by dusk is a husk. I can’t wait for a game and a drink with Jane, then dinner watching some streamed entertainment that’s not too taxing.
Routine consoles. Any consideration of “What next” consumes attention and breeds anxiety. We can only think one thing at a time; the less time spent planning, the more pondering, the happier I. The logistics of being are a bore; I resent their inexorable intrusion. The more automatic my body, the freer my mind.
Henry, too, craves predictability. If one mapped his day, his consistency would startle. He knows when it’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, reveille, taps, time for a treat. He favors posts and postures for different hours. He waits patiently while I work, but when it’s time to wake or walk, he pesters incessantly (and hilariously). Repetition for him is not boring, but consoling. His world makes sense.
Avidity for regimentation differs no less than our fingerprints. Some folks move restlessly yet think the same thoughts; for others, it’s the opposite. Mine and Henry’s plodding day would bore many, whereas I find activity tedious without space for thought. As my remaining minutes dwindle, I grow antsier with innutritious activity. Books, movies, celebrations drag on too long. Windbags blab, saying nothing.
The writing I favor is crammed with interest – its manner no less than its matter. Different epochs composed at different paces, depending on their audience’s availability. In the nineteenth century, the reading classes’ leisure hung heavy, so their authors wrote long. Montaigne, Bacon, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, and Emerson did not expect their readers to dawdle. Shakespeare, the dramatist, his anxious gaze directed at his customers, can’t write excitingly enough.
My goal is to vivify fifteen minutes of your hectic day. I merit erasure if I bore. Trollope could write fast because his prose is casual, intended to consume hours. I write as if you’re checking your watch.
After dinner and our streamed entertainment – an hour’s long enough, more than two an ordeal – dishes stowed – I treat myself to an hour of online backgammon, the suspense of which utterly abducts my attention from the dread du jour. Then I’m ready to read again, with Jane, in bed, Henry curled at our feet, in his usual position.
An hour with my book is all I’m good for. Then I go to sleep fast, so I can wake to work. I’ve no time for insomnia; its occasional intervention infuriates. A day without my fifteen hundred to two thousand new words makes me feel a wastrel. The quality of my words isn’t up to me – I can’t write better than I can – but diligence is my obligation. The eulogy I hope for is “He did his best.” If this obsessiveness sounds psychotic, it does to me too. I resent days off. These will abound soon enough.