Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (10 page)

This was Boswell on one of his good days. Other mornings he woke in a foul mood, “
dreary as a dromedary,” convinced that “
Everything is insipid or everything is dark.” Or, in the middle of a good day, depression would suddenly steal upon him out of nowhere. There seemed to be little he could do to control these black moods. To comfort himself, Boswell liked to wash his feet in warm
water (“
It gives me a kind of tranquility”) or drink a cup of green tea, which, he wrote, “
comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant of spirituous liquors.” And then there was his Inviolable Plan, an elaborate and somewhat portentous pep talk and statement of purpose that he wrote to himself in October 1763. The Plan is full of resolutions large and small—to avoid idleness, to remember “
the dignity of human nature,” to exercise regularly—as well as some moments of hard-won insight. Boswell writes, “
Life has much uneasiness; that is certain. Always remember that, and it will never surprise you.”

Kant’s biography is unusually devoid of external events. The philosopher lived in an isolated Prussian province for his entire life, rarely venturing outside the walls of his native Königsberg and never traveling even so far as the sea, only a few hours away. A lifelong bachelor, he taught the same courses at the local university for more than forty years. His was a life of ordered regularity—which later gave rise to a portrait of the philosopher as a sort of characterless automaton. As Heinrich Heine wrote:

In actual fact, as Manfred Kuehn argues in his 2001 biography, Kant’s life was not quite as abstract and passionless as Heine and others have supposed. Kant loved to socialize, and he was a gifted conversationalist and a genial host. If he failed to live a more adventurous life, it was largely due to his health: the philosopher had a congenital skeletal defect that caused him to develop an abnormally small chest, which compressed his heart and lungs and contributed to a generally delicate constitution. In order to prolong his life with the condition—and in an effort to quell the mental anguish caused by his lifelong hypochondria—Kant adopted what he called “
a certain uniformity in the way of living and in the matters about which I employ my mind.”

As for the extreme fixity of this regimen, this did not develop until the philosopher reached his fortieth birthday, and then it was an expression of his unique views on human character. Character, for Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one’s life, based on years of varied experience—indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty. And at the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims—a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life. Alas, we do not have a
written list of Kant’s personal maxims. But it is clear that he resolved to transform the “certain uniformity” of his lifestyle from a mere habit into a moral principle. Thus, before his fortieth birthday, Kant would sometimes stay out until midnight playing cards; after forty, he stuck to his daily routine without exception.

This routine was as follows: Kant rose at 5:00
A.M.
, after being woken by his longtime servant, a retired soldier under explicit orders not to let the master oversleep. Then he drank one or two cups of weak tea and smoked his pipe. According to Kuehn, “
Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on.” After this period of meditation, Kant prepared his day’s lectures and did some writing. Lectures began at 7:00
A.M.
and lasted until 11:00. His academic duties discharged, Kant would go to a restaurant or a pub for lunch, his only real meal of the day. He did not limit his dining company to his fellow academics but enjoyed mixing with townspeople from a variety of backgrounds. As for the meal itself, he preferred simple fare, with the meat well done, accompanied by good wine. Lunch might go until as late as 3:00, after which Kant took his famous walk and visited his closest friend, Joseph Green. They would converse until 7:00 on weekdays (9:00 on weekends, perhaps joined by another friend). Returning home, Kant would do some more work and read before going to bed precisely at 10:00.

In April 1870, a twenty-eight-year-old James made a cautionary note to himself in his diary. “
Recollect,” he wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.” The importance of forming such “habits of order” later became one of James’s great subjects as a psychologist. In one of the lectures he delivered to teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1892—and eventually incorporated into his book
Psychology: A Briefer Course
—James argued that the “
great thing” in education is to “
make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

James was writing from personal experience—the hypothetical sufferer is, in fact, a thinly disguised description of himself. For James kept no regular schedule, was
chronically indecisive, and lived a disorderly, unsettled life. As Robert D. Richardson wrote in his 2006 biography, “
James on habit, then, is not the smug advice of some martinet, but the too-late-learned too-little-self-knowing, pathetically earnest, hard-won crumbs of practical advice offered by a man who really had no habits—or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits—and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.”

Nevertheless, we can summarize a few of James’s tendencies. He drank moderately and would have a cocktail before dinner. He stopped smoking and drinking coffee in his mid-thirties, although he would cheat with the occasional cigar. He suffered from insomnia, particularly when he was deep into a writing project, and beginning in the 1880s he used chloroform to put himself to sleep. Before bed, if his eyes weren’t too tired, he would sit up and read until 11:00 or midnight, which, he found, “very much enlarges the day.” In his later years, he took a nap every afternoon from 2:00 to 3:00. He procrastinated. As he told one of his classes, “
I know a person who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up a newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests.”

Unlike his restless, compulsive older brother, Henry James always maintained regular working habits. He wrote every day, beginning in the morning and usually ending at about lunchtime. In his later years, severe wrist pain forced him to abandon his pen for dictation to a secretary, who would arrive each day at 9:30
A.M.
After dictating all morning, James would read in the afternoon, have tea, go for a walk, eat dinner, and spend the evening making notes for the next day’s work. (For a while he asked one of his secretaries to return in the evenings for further dictation; to keep her alert, he would lay bars of chocolate beside her typewriter as she worked.) Like Anthony Trollope (
this page
), James started a new book the instant the old one was finished. Asked once when he found the time to form the design of a new book, James rolled his eyes, patted the questioner on the knee, and said, “
It’s all
about
, it’s about—it’s in the air—it, so to speak, follows me and dogs me.”

In 1908, Kafka landed a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he was fortunate to be on the coveted “
single shift” system, which meant office hours from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Although this was a distinct improvement over his previous job at a different insurance firm, which required long hours and frequent overtime, Kafka still felt stymied; he was living with his family in a cramped apartment, where he could muster the concentration to write only late at night, when everyone else was asleep. As Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer in 1912, “
time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward
life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” In the same letter, he goes on to describe his timetable:

Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer in Budapest in 1917, near the end of their five-year, mostly epistolary relationship
(
photo credit 53.1
)

“
A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism” is how the Irish novelist once described himself. In his daily habits, at least, he was not given to self-control or even much regularity. Left to his own devices, Joyce would typically rise late in the morning and use the afternoon (when, he said, “
the mind is at its best”) to write or to fulfill whatever professional obligations he might be under—often, teaching English or giving piano lessons to pay the bills. His evenings were spent socializing at cafés or restaurants, and they sometimes ended early the next morning with Joyce, who was proud of his tenor singing voice, belting out old Irish songs at the bar.

A more detailed glimpse of Joyce’s routine comes from 1910, when he was living in Trieste, Italy, with his wife, Nora, their two children, and his more responsible younger brother, Stanislaus, who bailed the family out of financial straits numerous times. Joyce was struggling to find a publisher for
Dubliners
, and was teaching private piano lessons at home. The biographer Richard Ellmann describes his day: