The snail, briefly
In defence of slowing down
Hello.
Last week, I got sick. My body gave up and forced me to stop. On the Monday, I’d felt the penumbra of disease. By Tuesday, the shadow was thick and opaque. Come Wednesday, with its midweek light, the cloud was full dark and I had to accept that I could not go to work. It was a rapid descent, one that had, I suppose, been inevitable. That yes-I’m-still-around virus was there, waiting for my immune system to crumble.
On the Wednesday afternoon—after resorting to Zoom so I could still teach my undergrads, and following a long meeting with my team—I broke out in fever and crawled into bed. I slotted myself beneath the duvet, requested a hot water bottle from my darling wife, then curled up into a shivering ball.
And do you know what’s messed up? Do you know what’s made me question my own reality of the last few months?
I liked it.
I really fucking liked it.
It was the first time my brain had stopped thinking about work since, oh, I don’t know, let’s say January. All I could focus on was trying to regain some homeostatic control of my own body. And so I gave in, slipping into the oddly comforting embrace of fever. I drifted in and out of consciousness to discussions of literary science fiction. With one eye, I watched videos of various bouldering world cups. (My YouTube algorithm is a very confused place.)
It was, in relative terms, bliss. I was overcome with a deep sense that—again, in relative terms—nothing else mattered other than getting better. That singular fact created an explosion of relief. I let go of work; in its place I felt a rush.
In those brief few hours (and some of the days that followed) I allowed myself to slow down. I drank tea and my beloved coffee. I read. I played some games. I gave in to the acceptance that I was sick and didn’t beat myself up for not doing enough of the things, not getting through enough of the tasks, not dealing with the endless stream of stuff that assails all of us each day, the mountain that, despite Herculean efforts, simply will… never… diminish. (Hi, Oliver Burkeman.)
This week, of course, the raging furnace of all the things has returned. Semester is almost at an end, which brings elation yet also the strange sense of the numb. I should be grateful—and I am—but once again it is an anti-climax. The deadlines don’t change. They just morph, take on different forms. There’s a talk to prepare. A conference to attend, PhD theses to dredge from the shipwrecked waters of my vacant supervision. Soon there will be exams to mark, grants to review. Blah blah blah. On this recovered side of being sick, I try to approach it with the necessary tag of whatever.
Through all this, I am acutely aware of a constant: my desire to write. The desire to unmoor myself from routine and find solace instead in the implicit simplicity of words. It’s been hard to find that time. I’ve struggled this week. With some sadness, there is no fiction here in this post. I was going to apologise, and then I realised that would be ridiculous. If you’ve been here a while you know I’m apt to flit between fiction and fact1, and this just so happens to be a week of the latter.
In the closing moments of this brief missive, I realise I have brought something of the slow with me into the return to the rushed. I’m reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun vol. 2 and nothing has brought me more joy than to remember why I love Gene’s writing. He is a master. His ability to craft a dense narrative that rewards the attention of the slow is unmatched. After tearing through a series of books these last few months—an act that perhaps mirrored too many aspects of my life—I have embraced The Slow Read. Each morning and night, as I commute along the battered tracks of Melbourne’s railways, I let go of everything else and succumb to Severian’s tale, the story of the torturer, as told by Severian, as told by Gene Wolfe. My pencil circles words. My hand scrawls marginalia.
I proceed at a snail’s pace, savouring each blade of meaning.
How strange it is that the sky, which by day is a stationary ground on which the clouds are seen to move, by night becomes the backdrop for Urth’s own motion, so that we feel her rolling beneath us like a sailor feels the running of the tide.
—Gene Wolfe.
Let’s face it, this entire post could be a lie.
“Let’s face it, this entire post could be a lie.” Ah-ha! Let’s remember how good this guy is at creating an unreliable narrator who’s capable of garnering our deep sympathies! I’m sorry sir, I’m going to require a note from your doctor.
What have our lives become that we actually welcome being sick as it is the only way we allow ourselves to slow down and rest? I think it is everyone, Nathan. I wonder if addiction to the internet could be the culprit? Never letting our minds rest. I recently learned that it is very common for the young to take their phones to bed with them and often engage with it through out the night, afraid if they sleep they will miss something. That can't be a good sign. Just something that came to mind.