A Sentence a Day

The British comedy team Flanders and Swan sing a wonderful song about a sloth who imagines all he could be if he were a different creature. He could “win a war then write a book about it” or “compose an oratorio that was sublime.” His problem, he laments, is “I just don’t have the time.”

One doesn’t have to be a sloth to feel the press of busyness. Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than workers in any other industrialized nation. What’s more, each year our workload increases, and the time for personal reflection and creative endeavors outside the workplace diminishes. It is easy to say that we should take a stand, refuse workplace demands, and luxuriate in leisure with our families. Perhaps we should, but we must not forget that our workplace lives are meaningful and that what we accomplish there is of consequence.

Rather than cut loose from responsibilities, we must find ways to fit those responsibilities into lives ordered by reflection and creativity. While this will not necessarily open expanses of time for us, it will reorganize our priorities and our outlooks. I learned something of this about a dozen years ago when I accepted an administrative position in the college where I teach. For more than 25 years, I had been a privileged faculty member enjoying a light load with time to think and write. Apart from the hours in class, my time was mine. Suddenly I found myself “going to the office” and attending meeting after meeting.

Without open blocks of time, I felt myself disoriented and at a loss. One morning, a friend remarked that he enjoyed the aphoristic style of the prose in my last book and commented that I talk the same way—in pithy bursts. With no time to write a book or even an essay, I determined—if the essence of my style was the pithy burst—that I would write a daily sentence. I started to listen to myself and to jot down on scraps of paper what I heard.

Each morning when I got to my office, I’d dig the scraps from my pockets and polish one sentence:

• Grace always offends justice.

• Some desire faith to move mountains; in this age of bulldozers we need faith to keep them in place.

• A measure of character is the ability to refuse power.

• A cat on the birdfeeder is not after seeds.

By the end of the year I had more than 300 sentences. I typed them up and sent them to my agent who sold them to the first publisher he offered them to. I hadn’t written an oratorio, but the collection, issued as a novelty item and sold from a cash register display, remains my bestselling book. I think my success came not so much from claiming a few loose minutes from the day but from fitting the busyness of my work into my writer’s habit of attention and reflection. For that I had the time.