A lying down job

Louise is undoubtedly dead by now, but 35 years ago she was a 72-year-old waitress at George’s Greek Restaurant in Athens, Ohio—a tough, assertive woman with an unruly mop of snow white curls. In her white work shoes, she measured 4 feet 10 inches, which meant she was close to the tabletops and the customers’ faces; she could take orders and lay the plates down without bending over and was the fastest server in the place. That translated into more tips. And in an era when we made 80 cents per hour, tips meant the difference between paying the rent and dying in a ditch. Louise was one of the best co-workers I’ve ever had, a wisecracker with a real talent for complaining and commiserating. At the end of the lunch rush, we used to sit at the counter and count the tips—mostly coins in those days—and she used to groan, rubbing her arthritic knees, and say, “What I need is a good lying down job.” I think she had something else in mind, but I took what I needed of her advice and went to graduate school in the humanities.

Thousands of books and several languages and countries later, I find myself craving a lying down job of my own. Turns out there’s no such thing. Though it is true that some of my work can be done in jammies, there’s a lot of running around and shouting, too. Done right, reading the great books should keep you up at night, should stir dormant parts of your brain, should present you with new ways of looking at the world, should make you strap on your hoppin’ shoes.

One of Anton Chekhov’s characters says that outside the house of every satisfied person there should be a man standing at the door, tapping on it with a hammer to remind him that misfortune—illness, poverty, loss—lurks out there, claws ready. Some people view a great novel as something like that hammer-wielding man—a disgruntled, restless, maladjusted psychopath who just can’t wait to ruin your day. Some books are like that. But others become your friends. And some great books hammer at your door shouting to you that the world is full of unspeakable joy, if you’d only take the time to peek outside. One of Tolstoy’s early readers wrote him that he loved “War and Peace” so much that when he reached the end, he immediately turned back to the first page and read it again straight through.

Somewhere in there, there has to be some lying around. Writer, medical doctor and global health specialist Chekhov—who crossed 10 time zones in a peasant cart, who built schools and libraries, who toiled to rid the Russian countryside of cholera and famine, who treated a wide variety of the uglier and more disgusting peasant ailments without charging fees, who wrote a huge demographic study of the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, who created more characters than any other Russian writer (yes, more than Dostoevsky and Tolstoy) and who revolutionized the world theater and the short story—all while suffering from the tuberculosis that caused his death at age 44—used to complain constantly of his laziness, hanging around and “shooting the breeze,” he would say.

Given the result, you have to assume that some of that downtime was a necessary part of the writer’s work. You can see a lot when you’re not moving fast, after all. One way to test this is to walk down a road you usually drive. When you do this, you don’t have to look constantly straight ahead to the next strip of highway. There’s the teeming of microworlds below, the vast, infinite sky above and, with luck, someone by your side. Do this enough and you’ll wonder why you’re in a hurry to get anywhere else.

Writers offer you this option. They’ll create an interesting character and set him off on a plot of flight or quest, a journey from one place to another, from childhood to adulthood, from East to West, from something to nothing or from nothing to something. Something like your journey through life. At the end, you’ll realize that the point was not to get to the end but to spend some time on the road with the guy, looking around.

Consider this a possible plan for your time at Duke. One of my sophomores emailed me this past Fall to let me know that she couldn’t enroll in any of the courses she wanted this Spring. Turns out, all of them were in future business, practical skills, money making, management, startups and pre-careers, and every last one of them was filled up. “Chto delat?” the Russians would say: “What is to be done?”

One option is to consider taking a course that has to do with where you are, rather than where you think you’re going. While you’re waiting for things to happen in your life, sign up for a few good books. Call it a lying down course.