Procrastination and Punditry
By Jim Sleeper (December, 2022)
I’m procrastinating. I’m procrastinating so badly that yesterday, in a holiday, end-of year mood, I read Samuel Johnson’s essay on procrastination in the June 29, 1751 edition of The Rambler. That leaves many more essays to read on this subject as I gather my strength and resolution for the greater work I intend to complete in the coming year.
I certainly can’t afford not to complete it. As I read other writers’ richly-sourced, deeply intuited – nay, oracular – work, I’m reminded that this desperate world can’t afford my procrastination any more than it could afford theirs.
Yet even the great Samuel Johnson procrastinated. He even postponed completing his sentences so often that, at times, he sounded like Mark Twain’s German professor, who was so old that he died before he got to the verb. Here is Johnson: “Though to a writer whose design is so comprehensive and miscellaneous that he may accommodate himself with a topic from every scene of life, or view of nature, it is no great aggravation of his task to be obliged to a sudden composition, yet I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.”
So writes Johnson. At least, I’ve been told on good authority that that’s writing. But maybe he was only trying and failing to acknowledge that although his far-ranging interests should have made it easy to pick a topic for a column, he dithered too often to decide. Or so I’ve decided about him.
There, you see? I can complete important work if I must!
Then again, isn’t each of my own columns a kind of dithering or a simulation of bold action on some distant and therefore seemingly manageable problem? Instead of slaying dragons, aren’t I just slaying earthworms, as I do sometimes in Salon — for example, on the eve of the 2020 election.You may wonder which earthworm I’ll slay next. I forbear to answer that question. Before I strike at the next monster, I’ll want to have done the careful, painful preparation necessary to landing the fatal blow.
I’m working on it. As you can see.
Do be patient. Think of all the things you’ve pretended to have done but haven’t. You’ve pretended that you’ve read certain books when, really, you’ve read only the reviews. And then there are things that you really did read but pretend that you haven’t. (My columns here in Salon, for instance,) That isn’t procrastination on your part. It’s merely perversity, a separate subject for another time.
Some journalists believe that curiosity and judgment run in one direction only — from us scribblers to whomever we write about, but never the other way ’round. Behind all the excitement that we generate, we’re distracting your attention from our foibles. Maybe we’re even distracting ourselves. Then again, maybe our sensation mongering is another way of procrastinating against accomplishing whatever we’ve truly been put on earth to do. (Whatever that is.)
George Orwell resisted such distractions when he tried to tell some big, painful truths about the Spanish Civil War – for example, that the left’s Stalinist, Communist heroes in that fateful conflict were murdering the democratic-socialist left as much as they were murdering fascists. Orwell’s truth-telling was suppressed or studiously ignored, his motives questioned by people who didn’t question their own. My own motives may have been questioned that way at times, but what really annoys me is procrastination itself. Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator, that’s the problem. So, I’d better get back to work. When I’ve completed it, if I ever do, surely someone will be wise and bold enough to publish it.