Life Requires an Enormous Amount of Doing

I have never been much of a novel reader. I realize this is not an especially sophisticated thing to admit in writing. I like books. I like ideas. I like reading. But give me four hundred pages of fictional people moving through fictional lives and, somewhere around page seventy, I begin wondering how much longer we are going to be doing this.

I don’t need a murder. Nobody has to disappear. Very little has to happen at all. I can happily read ten pages in which nobody leaves the house, provided the writer has gone somewhere. That’s the distinction, I think. I don’t require action. I require movement. Something has to shift—in the thinking, in the observation, in what I understand. I don’t particularly care where we go. I just don’t want to be exactly where we started.

The first novel I remember liking was The Catcher in the Rye. I was a teenager, and Holden Caulfield seemed to have an opinion about everything. He wasn’t simply moving through the world. He was constantly telling me what he thought about it. I liked this enormously. Years later, I read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and surprisingly couldn’t put it down. More than five hundred pages, and at no point did I wonder how much longer we were going to be doing this. I considered this a breakthrough.

Then I read Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which was another success. In retrospect, the title should have told me everything. Someone had gone somewhere. But it wasn’t really the plot I was chasing. I wanted to know what Semple was going to say next. The book was funny and strange and observant. Something was always moving, if not in the story, then in the thinking.

This, I have finally realized, is what I mean when I say I need things to go somewhere. The destination is almost beside the point. What I cannot tolerate is the sense that nothing has changed, that we are still standing exactly where we began.

I could examine the psychological origins of this. I prefer astrology.

I am a January Capricorn, and I am very pleased about it. I realize I had nothing whatsoever to do with this achievement. Still, it feels correct. Capricorns are supposedly always climbing toward something, which may explain why even my recreational reading requires forward motion. My mother was an Aquarius, and equally pleased about it. Aquarians are supposedly independent, original, and not especially concerned with what everyone else thinks. This suited my mother perfectly.

Not long ago, she read a memoir about the end of a marriage. When she finished it, I asked what she thought. “Nothing happened,” she said. I reminded her that the woman’s husband had asked her for a divorce. “That’s what happened,” she said. “He asked her for a divorce.” She couldn’t understand why this had required an entire book. I laughed. Several hundred pages, reduced to one sentence. She was not entirely wrong.

When I read, I want the detail to lead somewhere. An experience becomes an observation. An observation becomes an idea. I want to arrive at a sentence that makes me understand everything before it slightly differently.

Maybe this is why I became interested in writing at this particular moment in my life. I had the opposite problem. Too much had happened.

My mother died after a long illness and a long divorce, and suddenly there was an extraordinary amount to do. There were lawyers and accountants, an apartment to empty, accounts to close, bills to pay, tax returns, insurance policies to transfer, passwords and death certificates. I had spent years imagining what it would feel like to lose my mother. None of those imaginings involved tax returns. This was an oversight.

Grief may be enormous, but it arrives with an astonishing amount of administration. You can miss someone so much that you cannot comprehend that she is gone and still need to locate a password, close an account, or explain for the fifth time that the account holder is dead. You can cry in the morning and spend the afternoon on hold with an insurance company, where your grief is of considerably less interest than your account number. Death does not suspend the ordinary requirements of life. If anything, it creates more of them.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I arrived at a conclusion so obvious that I was slightly annoyed it had taken me this long to notice it: life requires an enormous amount of doing.

Most of this doing is not particularly interesting. It is maintenance. Remembering. Noticing there is no toilet paper before there is no toilet paper. The endless collection of small acts required to keep a life from quietly coming apart.

We describe a life in enormous nouns: love, family, friendship, career, home, happiness, loss. Actually living one consists mostly of very small verbs. Call. Pay. Buy. Return. Remember. Schedule. Pick up. Drop off. Answer. The nouns get all the attention. The verbs are apparently expected to manage without recognition.

None of this is what we mean when we talk about a life, although it is apparently how we spend one.

And yet we barely count any of this as living. We treat it as administrative debris standing between us and our actual lives, which are presumably about to begin as soon as we return the package. The real life is somewhere else: the vacation, the accomplishment, falling in love, the beautiful dinner, the house, the Sunday afternoon when everyone is healthy and nobody needs anything from you.

Apparently, the theory is that if we complete enough errands, answer enough emails and return enough packages, we will eventually be released into our actual lives.

I have seen no evidence that this happens. There is always another email.

The things we regard as interruptions to life may, in fact, constitute most of it.

You can tell someone you love them, but eventually someone still has to pick them up at the airport. Friendship requires answering the phone. Having a family requires remembering things other people forget. Even beauty requires maintenance. The flowers have to be put in water. The good china has to be washed. Nothing, apparently, is self-supporting.

My mother was very good at all of this. She remembered the birthday, sent the thank-you note, made the appointment. She kept the refrigerator stocked, but never by going to one place and buying everything at once. She was old-fashioned that way. Meat came from the butcher, vegetables from the gourmet market, tea from the tea shop. There were boxes of macarons from Ladurée, one of her favorite places, and wine from a fancy wine shop uptown. She barely drank, but the bar was always stocked because someone else might. She noticed when something was running low, when something needed replacing, when something simply needed to be dealt with. And then she dealt with it.

None of this seemed particularly philosophical when she was alive. It was simply the way she lived. I understand it differently now.

This is one of the peculiar things about losing someone. You discover the significance of certain ordinary things only after the person who made them ordinary is no longer there to do them. We imagine grief attaching itself to birthdays, holidays, photographs, last words. The thing you miss is not always the thing you would have thought to photograph.

I have also started to think differently about love. Love is not always tender or particularly photogenic. Sometimes love is sitting beside someone for a while. Sometimes it is fighting for them. Sometimes it is making the phone call they cannot make themselves. A surprising amount of love is simply doing what needs to be done.

Courage is similar. It rarely feels like courage while you’re doing it. Mostly it feels like there is something that needs to be done and, for reasons that remain unclear, you appear to be the person who has to do it. So you do it. Then there is another thing.

But a life cannot consist entirely of things that need to be done. Or at least I hope not.

There are also things that accomplish absolutely nothing: flowers bought for no reason, a cappuccino in a real cup, wearing something much too nice for where you’re going, butter, a very good peach, a beautiful old woman walking down the street in an extraordinary coat, someone making you laugh when you were determined to remain furious. None of these things is useful. This may be precisely why I like them.

The flowers cannot negotiate on your behalf. The cappuccino has no useful advice. The extraordinary coat is not going to answer the email. They are useless. I mean this as a compliment.

We have become suspicious of anything that cannot produce a measurable improvement. A walk must improve our health. A vacation should restore us. A hobby should reduce stress. Reading should make us smarter. Even doing nothing has somehow acquired objectives. Apparently it is no longer enough to have enjoyed yourself. This strikes me as a rather exhausting way to be alive.

Suffering has been given perhaps the worst assignment of all. It is expected to make us better people.

I don’t believe this. Some losses teach us things because afterward we are different people and cannot help noticing what we know now. That doesn’t make the loss useful. It doesn’t make it necessary. It certainly doesn’t make it a gift.

Meaning is something the living do afterward.

My mother died. I have learned things because my mother died. I would rather have learned nothing.

And yet life continues, with what can occasionally feel like questionable taste. You can cry in the morning and laugh at dinner. You can miss someone desperately and still notice a beautiful dress. You can be furious and hungry for pasta. None of this makes the terrible thing less terrible. Terrible was never the only thing life was. The dog still needs walking. The email still needs answering. You can be thinking about mortality and someone will ask whether you want dessert. Yes. Obviously.

Perhaps the difficulty is that none of this is how we are taught to measure a life.

We have a fairly rigid system for determining whether a life is going well: career, relationship, house, children, money, accomplishment. Most of these things are easy to announce, which I suspect is part of their appeal.

We know what to do with an engagement. We know what to do with a promotion. There are photographs. There are congratulations. Sometimes there is champagne. Contentment is more socially awkward. There is no registry for being content.

We like evidence. Events are very good at providing it. They come with dates, documents, photographs and occasionally catering.

Ordinary life is less cooperative.

The trouble is, you rarely know you are going to miss it. Your mother is in the kitchen. You are in the other room. The dog needs walking. A friend stops by. Nothing about the day suggests that it will ever matter.

Maybe my mother was right about the book.

Nothing happened.

A great deal may have mattered.

I still need things to go somewhere. I am just less certain than I used to be about what somewhere looks like.