War & Piece by Piece

Presented in Three Pieces

1.

In case the title and photo don’t give away the game, I am finally reading War and Peace. I emphasize “finally” because English professors live under two constant assumptions: first, that “oh, you’re going to correct my grammar” and second, you’re required to have read every classic ever written. I can’t tell you how many times people have said, “What do you mean you haven’t read _________? You’re an English professor!” This is why I walk into the service areas of random car dealerships and yell, “You’ve never changed the oil on a 1968 Bentley? Amateur!”

Really, I’m reading War and Peace for a few reasons, and one of them is to simply slow down. Concentrate. Be involved with a single task for a long stretch and know that not only is this okay, but this is also largely how successful work has been done throughout the age of humans. I take 20 pages at a time and I’m 60 pages in—this could take four years and I could care less, as I am going to relish every second of this fictional world. The novel opens at a party and quickly moves to subsequent parlors and parties. My bookmark and I are still at one of these parties, sitting on something I imagine to be a divan. I have a snuff box. Napoleon looms on the dark horizon, but it’s likely a month or so until I’m properly introduced to France’s premier post-revolution emperor. His specter hovers like most of our worldly dangers—initially quiet, just a tremor, so you can still sit among friends and chat as if the world will remain the same. The bubble contains your voices as the sharp, puncturing point moves slowly forward, piece by informational piece.

2.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about deep work, protracted effort, the long game. Any synonym will do. My perception is that we’ve deprioritized this type of commitment in the age of refresh, notifications, pings and pushes, and more quick-attention demands than we ever dreamed possible. There are several people who, when we met, our initial connection was books. As the years have passed, many of them don’t read anymore in the same way, opting for audiobooks or podcasts. Not that this is bad, I’ve never really given audiobooks a try, and maybe I’m the one who is missing out. I admit to, when I was active on social media, having a hard time sitting down and focusing on a book, even making it through the first 50 pages. I was lucky enough to recognize this and course correct, as I don’t think I could ever, if I maintain my mind, surrender reading physical books. In that world, I’m pretty much always going at the same speed, it’s just the number of pages that changes.

Referring to a previous post, this connects to both my paradoxical fear of being, and desire to be, left behind. And while I want to slow down, our world trains us that this is wrong, inefficient, and unproductive—this makes slowing down difficult. (After all, what is your side hustle!) You have to train yourself to decelerate. You know what else is hard? Breaking habits. Maybe I have a head start because I haven’t been on social media for years, and Napoleon won’t be here for anytime soon, but I’m starting to have some success. Just today I finished and incredible 450-page read, Anti-Judaism by David Nirenberg, which I poured over to answer a single question that I couldn’t answer for myself—why is antisemitism so persistent through time? Why is it still present today in places like America? I admit to being completely baffled by this, but now I finally have some answers and a long list of suggested readings (the book is an excellent cultural history and I highly recommend it).

For a more personal example of slowing down, I recently swam two miles in the YMCA pool. For those counting at home—and I have it on expert authority that there is something called “the swimmer’s mile”—two miles is 132 lengths. I swim slowly. I stare at the bottom of the pool and watch the tiles slide beneath me like history—people jump in and out of the pool to share my lane, but at the end I am always there alone, thinking about the poem I’m trying to write about all the broken neon signs in Los Angeles, about the younger generation Tolstoy has introduced me to because their worlds will soon be rendered unrecognizable. Pierre? What will happen to this awkward yet eager Pierre when Napoleon appears on horseback atop a hill? I am in no rush to find out, but I know I will get there.

This impulse to slow down has also made me want to dive back into the past—that place so derided in the world of the futurist—and revisit histories by Polybius, “old” literary criticism like Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Heck, I might sit down for an hour or two and think about how, in the 1970’s, a guy tried to jump across the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle with a literal rocket strapped to his back. This was broadcast on national television! I don’t know if “national television” exists anymore.

3.

One of the many reasons I want to slow down is because I believe this quality makes me a better teacher. It makes me better at “meeting people where they are”—a prized quality in this moment—because you don’t fear the pause or digression; you embrace them as opportunities.

Here’s a quick digression to perform slowing down and also serve as an example. I took my younger daughter to her tennis lesson last Saturday, and while she was playing, I was also listening to the lesson going on directly below me (you can watch from the second floor). The teacher was an older man, which probably means my age, and he was working with a younger kid who might have been, at most, a freshman in high school. During their lesson, I heard the teacher say, “Are you talking about when he went to the other universe?” I sat up in my chair. This was clearly not tennis talk. This resulted in a meeting at the net, teacher and student, where they had a two-minute conversation about…Aquaman. I mean legit comic-book Aquaman, not Jason Momoa Game of Thrones Aquaman. This was two minutes of pure slowing down (irony: you can slow down quickly), and they really got into it with a lot of back-and-forth verbal volleying. There was some dispute over an event, and they eventually came to an agreement about who indeed held the trident at the most important moment. They nodded, resumed positions, and started playing tennis. An interesting thing resulted—the kid started hitting great shots. He didn’t care about the score, about the last thing the teacher said about coming over the top of the ball. They just hit the ball, repetitively, in a way that you could say the game slowed down, all because Aquaman became part of the lesson.

The teacher not only met the student where he was, but he was also prepared to do so. If the lesson had been a class, the teacher essentially removed the threat that are grades, all by slowing down. Remember, it took Odysseus 10 years to get home from Troy (he was no Aquaman).