Merton becomes a successful multitasker , , ,
Nevertheless, during that year I was so busy and so immersed in activities and occupations that I had no time to think for very long on these things. The energy of that golden October and the stimulation of the cold, bright winter days when the wind swept down as sharp as knives from the shining Palisades kept driving me through the year in what seemed to be fine condition. I had never done so many different things at the same time or with such apparent success. I had discovered in myself something of a capacity for work and for activity and for enjoyment that I had never dreamed of. And everything began to come easy, as the saying goes.
It was not that I was really studying hard or working hard: but all of a sudden I had fallen into a kind of a mysterious knack of keeping a hundred different interests going in the air at the same time. It was a kind of a stupendous juggling act, a tour-de-force, and what surprised me most was that I managed to keep it up without collapsing. In the first place, I was carrying about eighteen points in my courses—the average amount. I had found out the simplest way of fulfilling the minimum requirements for each one.
Then there was the “Fourth Floor.” The fourth floor of John Jay Hall was the place where all the offices of the student publications and the Glee Club and the Student Board and all the rest were to be found. It was the noisiest and most agitated part of the campus. It was not gay, exactly. And I hardly ever saw, anywhere, antipathies and contentions and jealousies at once so petty, so open, and so sharp. The whole floor was constantly seething with the exchange of insults from office to office. Constantly, all day long, from morning to night, people were writing articles and drawing cartoons calling each other Fascists. Or else they were calling one another up on the phone and assuring one another in the coarsest terms of their undying hatred. It was all intellectual and verbal, as vicious as it could be, but it never became concrete, never descended into physical rage. For this reason, I think that it was all more or less of a game which everybody played for purposes that were remotely esthetic.
The campus was supposed to be, in that year, in a state of “intellectual ferment.” Everybody felt and even said that there were an unusual number of brilliant and original minds in the college. I think that it was to some extent true. Ad Reinhardt was certainly the best artist that had ever drawn for Jester, perhaps for any other college magazine. His issues of Jester were real magazines. I think that in cover designs and layouts he could have given lessons to some of the art-editors downtown. Everything he put out was original, and it was also funny, because for the first time in years Jester had some real writers contributing to it, and was not just an anthology of the same stale and obscene jokes that have been circulating through the sluggish system of American college magazines for two generations. By now Reinhardt had graduated, and so had the editor of the 1935 Spectator, Jim Wechsler.
My first approach to the Fourth Floor had been rather circumspect, after the manner of Cambridge. I went to my adviser, Prof McKee, and asked him how to go about it, and he gave me a letter of introduction to Leonard Robinson who was editor of The Columbia Review, the literary magazine. I don’t know what Robinson would have made of a letter of introduction. Anyway, I never got to meeting him after all. When I went to the Review office I gave the note to Bob Giroux, an associate editor, and he looked at it and scratched his head some bit and told me to write something if I got an idea.
By 1936 Leonard Robinson had vanished. I always heard a lot about Robinson, and it all adds up to nothing very clear, so that I have always had the impression that he somehow lives in the trees. I pray that he may go to heaven.
As for Review, Robert Paul Smith and Robert Giroux were both editing it together, and it was good. I don’t know whether you would use the term “ferment” in their case, but Smith and Giroux were both good writers. Also, Giroux was a Catholic and a person strangely placid for the Fourth Floor. He had no part in its feuds and, as a matter of fact, you did not see him around there very much. John Berryman was more or less the star on Review that year. He was the most earnest-looking man on the campus.
There was not an office on that floor where I did not have something to do, except the Glee Club and Student Board and the big place where all the football coaches had their desks. I was writing stories for Spectator, and columns that were supposed to be funny; I was writing things for the yearbook and trying to sell copies of it—a thankless task. The yearbook was the one thing nobody wanted: it was expensive and dull. Of this I eventually became editor, without any evident benefit to myself or to the book or to Columbia or to the world.
For most of my life, I have been a multitasker, like Merton. I have to believe that Merton is being more than a little disingenuous when he says that he learned how to fulfill the minimum requirements for each of his commitments. Merton's genius was spiritual (and spiritual writing). He eventually took all of his life experiences and transformed them, through his writing and thinking, into something remarkable. Sacred. Holy. Nothing was wasted. All of this industry is, I think, evidence of a fertile and hungry mind and soul.
Multitasking is simply another term for being busy. I have been a busy person all my life. I prefer busyness, because it keeps my mind occupied. When my mind is not occupied, it tends to brood and over-analyze and obsess. When I do this, I can turn an unanswered text message to a friend into evidence of some deep and abiding rift that will never be repaired (even if I have said or done nothing to upset said friend). A misplaced fountain pen becomes evidence of early onset Alzheimer's. And an autumn cold, with its runny nose and cough a fatigue, is (you guessed it!) COVID.
Busyness keeps me from walking down those long and winding roads.
I also think that the world is too consumed with busyness. We have all become uncomfortable with silence and pause. If I am not occupied with something, I believe I am wasting time. I was brought up that way. Hard work, every minute of the day. That's what I was taught. It's the blue collar ethic. Work and work and work, and, eventually, you'll be rewarded. Or drop dead of a heart attack at 50.
I think that's why I became a poet. The poet's work is in the pause. Breath. A poem, for me, is a captured moment--something that makes me stop and savor. I'm sure everyone reading this post has had the experience of looking at a photograph and, for a brief moment, reliving that instant. Smelling the Thanksgiving turkey again. Hearing "Happy Birthday" being sung again. Opening that Christmas present again. Poets live in that photograph time, trying to hold onto that now, in order to understand the then and the will be.
And it's not all about presents and celebrations. In fact, it's rarely about presents and celebrations. For me, it's about those times when I have been fileted, laid bare, by life. Ernest Hemmingway once said, "Write hard and clear about what hurts." It's still good advice. Avoiding pain by keeping busy is simply avoidance, and the pain will still be there, waiting, at the end of the day.
Take it from a list-making, multi-tasking, three-jobbing poet: sacred pause is important. I do it every day, multiple times. In between all the other to-dos of my life, I practice this greatest to-do: breathing in the pulsing, bleeding, laughing, sorrowing present. Like the apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey when they encounter the mysterious black monolith, I approach it, touch it, feel its humming skin. And I am transformed.
Saint Marty gives thanks for the miracle of moment.
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