irritable

I write these posts in the early morning (although I usually type them up much later in the day). This morning I'm in an irritable mood - impatient, dissatisfied, and a little angry. (Not with you, dear reader!) As I turn my thoughts to the fishing project, I find myself wondering about the idea of the 'day well spent'. ('A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work.') As the years pass, I find that I still have little idea of what makes for 'a day well spent' and I'm envious of people who who have a strong sense of how best to seize the day.

I feel as if I'm still experimenting with what it might be to spend time well and it seems to me, looking about me, that by the age of forty-three many people have already come to some conclusion about this. A day of holiday is an opportunity to do things that they love and that will bring them satisfaction. But I approach each bank holiday as if coming to the question for the first time. I doubt that a walk in the country will be time well spent, or an afternoon with people, or anything else for that matter. I like reading. The immersion in narrative is powerful and soothing. But I don't typically look back upon it as a really worthwhile use of time. In one way, I see work as time well spent, although, in another, I don't believe it's valuable at all.

I'm almost certainly overstating the particularity of this condition - there are no doubt many people like me. But the fishing literature returns again and again to the reliability of a day spent angling as a source of well-being and happiness, whether or not any fish are caught, whether or not it is raining.

Nature Again

A number of paths lead out from these irritable observations. First, counter-narratives. There are, in fact, stories of fishing that distance themselves from the notion that a day spent on the river is necessarily a day well spent. I'm thinking here of the stories of Raymond Carver, some of which use fishing trips as the background for strange and disturbing events.

In 'So Much Water So Close To Home', a group of men find a dead body in the river they intend to fish, and, rather than spoiling the trip by returning to the city to report it, they tie the body up so that it won't float away, and carry on fishing in close proximity to it. I don't think Carver is saying anything about anglers as a group here - far from it. The story deals more with the atomisation of modern life and the dubious nature of community. But precisely because the literature of fishing places so much emphasis on the value of time spent in nature - quite often, the moral value of days spent in that way - the amoral conduct of Carver's characters stands out particularly strongly from that background.

In a way, then, the story has a relationship with the ideas I developed in my post on the romanticisation of nature. I wrote there about Derek Jarman and his notion of 'modern nature' and I wonder now if 'modern nature' is the force that reasserts itself in the interstices of urban and industrial life - the garden created in the shadow of the power station or the guerilla gardeners who plant seeds in the empty lots of down-town Detroit. By contrast, 'romantic nature' both promises and conceals too much. It pretends to an idyllic condition - The Idylls is the collective title of Theocritus' bucolic poems for city-dwellers - and it turns its nose fastidiously away from the rotten parts of life, the parts that 'modern nature' acknowledges from the start.

Making Memories

A second point occurs to me and this one concerns memory. Earlier in the week I listened to The Human Zoo, a radio programme about psychology, and they were talking about happiness and the difficulty of defining what it is. They spoke to a psychologist who made a distinction between the happiness (or lack of it) that one feels as an experience is in progress and the happiness that arises in remembering the experience later. The latter, he suggested, has more influence than the former over whether people see themselves as in general contented and satisfied.

What interested me particularly is that the two kinds of happiness are actually fairly independent of one another. The psychologist gave a couple of examples. In one, he talked about the experience of listening to a concert and enjoying it thoroughly right up until the end when a horrible intrusive noise ruins the music for a moment. He pointed out that, in one sense, the noise did not ruin the concert. Listeners did, in fact, have the opportunity to listen to a good hour or so of fine music and derived enjoyment from it as it was happening. The point is that the nasty noise disrupts the memory of the event in a way that seriously undermines the possibility of registering it as 'time well spent'.

Conversely, it seems that unpleasant experiences - painful medical procedures, for example - leave less disturbing memories if the pain tails off rather than ending abruptly. The sense of 'things getting better' seems to affect how the experience is captured in memory and this is true even if the incrementally milder pain is added as an extra to that which arose from the essential treatment. In other words, although the sense of pain tailing off was achieved by increasing the total time spent in pain, the memories formed from that experience were more positive.

I found all this interesting not least because this semester I'm teaching a module on realism in narrative with two of my colleagues and, when literary scholars talk about first person narrative (ones told by a narrating 'I'), they make a distinction between the 'experiencing self' and the 'narrating self'. So, in a novel like Great Expectations, where the narrative is told by Pip, speaking of his own experiences in the first person, there is a productive - indeed, at times, electrifying - tension between the viewpoint of the younger Pip, who actually experiences the events, and that of his older self, who is telling you the story.

I'm very conscious that my own sense of 'time well spent' depends upon the capacity to make good memories, and quite often I go into activities hoping that they will be productive in this sense, only to find that they aren't. Since I'm in confessional mood, I'll admit that the biggest problem I've had since my former partner left me in 2011 is that the end of the relationship - and, more specifically, grievances I feel about how it ended - have wrecked the memories I have of the five years we spent together. Like the appalling noise at the end of the concert, the enjoyment of experience that I felt at the time has not given rise to memories that I can cherish. Those five years no longer feel 'well spent'. Not to moan too much! I'm learning to deal with this but it is something that has to be learned. The mental wiring does not make it easy.

Buddhists Again

The third point that occurs to me is the way in which Buddhist contemplative techniques attempt to dissolve some of the problems I wrote about in the last section - to untie the knots. The Buddhist insistence on presence - on attention paid to the here and now - claims to offer a different kind of relationship with experience, one that insists on the equality of every moment and denies a particular value to moments of special achievement or pleasure. (The very promise of a special pleasure to be found in the pursuit of particular activities is figured through a fishing metaphor, something I wrote about in my post on the demon fisherman.) The key Buddhist text here is the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta, which discusses the practice of sati in meticulous detail.

People like me who have a depressive streak - what they used to call a 'melancholic disposition' - are increasingly told that this is the way to live. Abandon the idea that anything in particular will bring satisfaction and live the moments as they come. And there is a stream in the fishing literature, I think, that affirms the 'nowness' of the experience in an analogous sense. Maybe it's captured in the quotation that Hugh posted - a line from Kirk Deeter, the 'editor-at-large' for Field and Stream:  'Paradise is being in a space where all that matters in your entire universe is what might happen within the next five seconds in that pocket of promising water 35 feet in front of you'. Thinking even five seconds ahead may technically be more than the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta suggests  - the pleasure Deeter evokes may still be structured too much around an experience of anticipation for the strict practitioner of sati. But, nevertheless, there is a sense of immediacy in the scenario - a shutting out of everything but the moment - that has something in common, if only loosely, with the insights of the Sutta.

Ending

So these are the thoughts that arose from my envy of those who seem clear about what they see as 'time well spent': various views of nature, the role of memory in the perception of oneself as 'happy', and the place of the present moment in Buddhist practice. As I finish this - relatively long - piece of morning writing, I feel better than I did when I sat down to write it. Less irritable, certainly. Less angry, perhaps. Maybe, then, time spent writing is, for me, time 'well spent'. But if that's so, it's annoying that writing is something that I find so bloody difficult.