Stillness Is the Move

Wait for it, man. The image is, like, a metaphor. For something.

I wanted to write a small piece to accompany the release of Episode II of Season II of The Readers Karamazov — our second episode on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. If you’re not following along yet, I highly recommend you do so (and even more highly recommend that you read the book; no hyperbole attached, it truly is one of the great novels). In doing so I hope to tie together a few of the threads we talked about during the course of our conversation, thinking more about what it means to do meaningful work.

Yesterday was an exceptionally good day for me. I found out that my first academic journal article has officially been published. The article represents the fruit of many years of labor and waiting. I first submitted the article to Religion & Literature three and a half years ago, having spent a long time revising it from “seminar paper” shape to “submittable article” shape. I then waited for 6 months only to receive a “Revise & Resubmit” decision, meaning a significant amount more work for me. After resubmitting, I waited another 6 months to hear the final decision of acceptance. That’s over a year already; then another two waiting to go from accepted to published. I sketch this timeline not to complain, but rather to illustrate the long fallow stretches of academic life (which make the eventual success quite satisfying, to be sure). That excellent news was then topped off by seeing my recent review of a book on Muriel Spark get effusively praised on Twitter by a hero of mine.

So, it was a good day, as they say, made all the sweeter by the rarity of such confluences happening. For those of us further down the academic food chain, at least, hearing positive feedback about the work we do seems vanishingly rare. There are many days when I look around at the desolate academic job market that I’m entering for a third time this year, or think about how ill-fitting and unsexy my own brand of research is within the broad stream of current humanities trends, and wonder what I’m doing with my time. The same holds true with other areas of life. The podcast is growing, but is it growing fast enough? We haven’t dominated our own little niche yet — does that make what we do a waste of time? The doubts even creep into my parenting: am I preparing my children to CHANGE THE WORLD?

That’s why I take a lot of solace in the figure of Caleb Garth, whom we discuss in this week’s episode. By worldly lights Garth is a failure: too much a craftsman, not nearly enough of a salesman, he does his work as a builder well, but never sees the compensation he really deserves for his labor. But Eliot gives him, generally a soft spoken character, this wonderful speech in the middle of the novel:

”It’s a fine thing to come to a man when he’s seen into the nature of business: to have the chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done—that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I’d sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most honorable work that is.”

Here Eliot lays out for us a vision of work that is not dependent on external validation but on internal quality. It’s an inspiring vision, but I also admit that it seems more immediately applicable to manual labor such as practiced by Garth than the life of the mind and the written word. Say my long-suffering novel eventually gets published, but it only sells 2,000 copies (even that’s generous given the current state of publishing). Laying aside money issues, would I be satisfied that so few people had read my words? Or, to scale things down further, let’s say I get my dissertation published as a monograph by a decent but not top-flight academic press, and only a few specialists ever bother to read it, it never gets reviewed, and makes virtually no impact on the state of my field. Could I be satisfied with that?

That’s why I really appreciated Friedrich taking us, later in the episode, to Eliot’s pathos-laden assessment of Casaubon’s scholarly work. Here she is laying it out:

”It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon’s uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.”

In a section we ultimately cut from the episode, Karl, Friedrich and I discussed how we related to that description of Casaubon — ultimately agreeing that we did, far more than is comfortable. To be surrounded by the glories of knowledge, but to be cowed by timidity, our own little eyes peeping out fearfully from behind the scholarly mask; this is an uncomfortable truth experienced by many academics.

Which brings me to the third and final thread. In between talking about Garth and Casaubon, I brought us to the work of Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and theologian whose Pensees form, I am increasingly convinced, an important backbone for the work Eliot does in Middlemarch. In particular I quoted some selections from Pascal on “diversion,” his word for the human experience of seeking after ephemeral pleasures in order to distract us from the hardships of reality. If only, he says, we could learn to sit quietly by ourselves in an empty room, we would have no need to chase after war, or hunting, or games.

So few of us achieve this stillness of mind. But it’s what I find myself yearning for increasingly in my vocation. To be able to do my work with a sense of satisfaction because I have measured it and found it true to the mark; to feel good in putting it out there even if few read it, because who can say that it won’t improve the fettle of the academic landscape even just a jot. Academia as a whole could use more Garths and fewer Casaubons. I can’t improve anyone else’s garden, but I can calmly, patiently till my own little patch of land.