A Knackered Cheer for Real Sentience

22 Sep, 2024

Friends, I am tired—exhausted, in fact. A recent mountain of work has something to do with it, but the real and willfully chosen culprit is the single intro class I started at the end of August. Combine adult responsibilities with something more in line with the beginner-level learning I would have been doing thirty years ago, and the desire to simply drop and hibernate wherever I land is nearly overpowering.

After I made some dumb quip the other day about wanting to bring back the notorious rest cure, I realized even while understanding said treatment was some generally bad thing that I only half knew what I was talking about. Five minutes of research was enough to make me feel I should be doing penance for my comment; the jerk who came up with the whole thing seemed to have taken the gender stereotypes of the time to their logical extremes. Hence thinking, much less active, life was just too much for frail females, whom Silas Weir Mitchell put straight to bed for ridiculously long stretches at a time, allowing them no stimulation and just a lot of fatty foods—sometimes asinine amounts of eggs. Dudes who were ready to throw in the towel, of course, were prescribed spirited rounds of manly cowboy-like activities.¹

The cause of everyone’s so-called neurasthenia was just too much—and I’m not kidding when I cite the actual term used—“brain work.” Loading the ladies down with all that milk and meat and inactivity would make anyone cease movement, physical or mental; would transform the object of this treatment back into the silent vegetables they were supposed to be. So although there’s a kernel of recognition there that mental activity can tire you out, past that point, everything in Mitchell’s set-up sounds like an absolute nightmare, albeit one I’m sure the contemporary Republican Party would be pretty enthusiastic about if it didn’t also involve giving people time off from their jobs.

So the rest cure’s not going to work for me, and thanks to the zero-social safety net commitments of these here United States, I’ll be surprised if I can even take a day off in the next couple of years. But the bad ideas swarming in Weir’s cure has me doubling down all the same on my love of brain work—as opposed to the work I do to earn a living—even of the sort that leads to exhaustion. Maybe my embrace is due to the fact that intellectual pursuits of so many sorts are derided by my own culture’s anti-intellectualism, giving rise to predictably disheartening results. Weir’s assumptions, his contemporary Billy Sunday’s portrayal of Jesus as some beefed-up sports hero, our own present filled with condemnation of professionals and experts as freedom-hating Marxists and calls for women to humble themselves through childbearing: although Richard Hofstadter’s still the champion for describing in full how American avoidance of thinking worked/s, few have summed up the whole multigenerational shebang better than Fyodor Sologub’s character Peredonov: “I never read. I am a patriot.”²

For one thing, the social fear behind brain work is obvious: encourage real thinking, and a lot of sacred cows—the truisms and prejudices that keep certain traditions and systems and their occupants in place—begin to look ordinary at best. For another, really learning new concepts, as in taking the time not just to skim over them, but to master and use them and understand how they relate to other phenomena, takes long, patient, concentrated, tiring effort—none of which is encouraged by hacks, fixes, unicorn investments, digital badges, and AI to do your work (even if shoddily) for you. Hand the patient assigned to the rest cure a smartphone and limitless data plan, and the resulting state of vegetation might just be what a chunk of the population aspires to.

It’s no surprise that I’ve been chided from childhood on for spending my free time reading or doing something like learning a new language. The disapproving assertions that I need to have some fun, as in (spending money) getting a pedicure, shopping, watching another sitcom, or playing video games, emerge from commentators unable to fathom the uncontainable joy that bubbles up when confronted with, say, a well-turned phrase. It’s precisely those brain-intensive pursuits—going home after some terrible round of “fun” and sitting down with some really dense philosophy or insanely obscure poetry—that have brought me back from the stupor of bridal showers or the latest iteration of sales calls masked as parties that you somehow can’t get out of (think Avon, Tupperware, Pampered Chef, or yes, some suburban housewife sex toy pyramid scheme that was unbelievable only to the degree that its would-be naughtiness was just another way of reinforcing who women were supposed to be for their men).

I realize there’s no real argument to what I’m saying, that maybe I just needed to huff a little and get back to the very pursuits that have stolen my sleep in the last few weeks. But the other thing about loving, and needing, all that brain work is that writing is part of it, and I’ve not been able to do much of that either recently. Consider this little piece, then, an attempt to hold on to the things that keep me sane, even as I try to find some way of balancing them all out with a little real rest and relaxation.

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