Giving Shape to Life

Considering Proust on Habit

Recently – within the last six months or so – I have picked up an onigiri habit. My original aim was to ween myself from my daily 7-Eleven bento, which had started to depress me. The first rush of novelty had long passed downstream, leaving my formerly beloved noodle salads and karaage-maki in a disenchanted, flavor-barren state. Not long after I realized the thrill was gone I found a book of onigiri recipes in the school library. The simple freshness therein called to me.

Several months of grasping after this new diet and the most noticeable change from before is the increase in my stock of canned tuna and mayonnaise. Instead of using fresh rice I have fallen to scraping out leftover grains from the previous night’s dinner. Not even the seaweed, which ought to be the simplest piece of the onigiri’s tripartite construction, is present in its traditional form. Instead of cutting the belt-like strip of nori I wrap an entire square sheet around the tuna-mayo and rice and cut the whole thing in half, resulting in a cross section that looks more like a block of illicit substance wrapped in green paper than it does Japanese soul-food. 

I haven’t quite succeeded in my goal of preparing my own lunch every day, either. I can only find the time to cobble together the suspicious “onigiri” I pack to work once or twice each week. I find myself at 7-Eleven the rest of the time, just as before, though I am sure to buy at least one onigiri when I go. While at 7-Eleven, I fake an inner dialogue while I stand in front of the shelf of onigiri, pretending that today I may find a new flavor, some alternative to lift me out of the routine – this is a second-order habit which serves only to reinforce the first. The luster has been washed clear of this onigiri lifestyle, but my resolution has come to fruition. 

 “The regularity of a habit is usually in direct proportion to its absurdity,” is the Proust quote that comes to mind. My planned habits rarely stick because my most natural, often disordered life kicks against such a strict rhythm. One cannot control their own absurdities; controlling habits is similarly a contradiction in terms. My current onigiri lifestyle has stuck around as long as it has because it is a bricolage of stopgaps, a helter-skelter maze from which I don’t quite know how to extricate myself. It has become a habit precisely because it has not accomplished what I wanted it to.

It is only natural that, in an age of managerialism, one will be taught to search for those “habits” which will allow them to achieve success without really trying. The individual is urged to be efficient, to only exercise thought when such effort is sure to bring a proportional benefit. But to Proust, there is no such thing as a successful, a beneficial habit. There is simply no fulfillment for a human being in any act which does not require their active will, and a habit, strengthened by our inability to be self-aware, is an abnegation from the use of the will which is so complete it could be said to subvert the criteria of success-failure entirely. Therefore why habits thrive in absurdity; the victim grows preoccupied with tending to the habit’s various eccentricities and proceeds to lose sight of the original goal (in my case, a fresh and nutritious lunch). 

There are certain rituals which, though I participate in them regularly, I cannot think of as habits. A habit must require no observable effort on the part of its victim. These “rituals,” on the other hand, exact a certain quantity of will, and I am every day aware of their flightiness, of the fact that, like a child darting here and there in a crowded park, if I were to let my attention slide from them for even a moment they would be lost. An example of such an unhabituated ritual would be my running. (The decision I make every day to leave my earbuds behind, even moreso.)

There is much that I enjoy about running, and I have found even more pleasure in the practice since I began to run without my earbuds. I don’t think I would be able to commit to my current marathon training if I was still mainlining Stevie Wonder into my brain while I did it. My longest runs take me pretty well out of the city, into suburbs and rice fields, and there I am able to connect with my body, to hear something reassuring in the silence. My experience has been comparable to what I’ve encountered with seated meditation: the running mind at first attempts to avoid pain and boredom by diverting towards whatever mundane anxieties it has on deck. It takes strange routes, uprooting quarrels from years ago and disturbing what confidence I have in my own athleticism. Yet these are shut up in due course, and eventually the mind has nothing to do but resolve itself to the most basic level of sensation. And as with meditation, by the end I feel a great sense of control, of willingness and awareness. 

It is the opposite of habit’s haze. As Proust writes in Sodom and Gomorrah, “If habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first, whose cruelties it lacks as well as its enchantments.”

I have written about the enchantments of first nature. What about these “cruelties?” That is the eye-catching word in Proust’s quote, the one worth pausing over. His narrator is usually quick to denounce habit as a denaturing of brighter sensibilities, a “colorless facsimile.” Yet the yearning to live a life free of all habit is strongest when one is not wholly aware of just why habit etches itself into us. 

Habit is a kind of adaptation or compromise. It is not just a failure to seek novel experience, but is also a reliable means of avoiding certain unbearable failures altogether. Habit covers us from our own human failings as well as cruelties of life; we have a habit of abandoning those we no longer wish to see in order to avoid hearing our own harsh words, or a habit of procrastinating the genius project in order to never learn whether it is merely a self-involved fantasy. Most adults can admit to having a long list of habits they repeat with their lovers. Where there is habit, there is not only absurdity but often a silhouette of pain.

What cruelty do I expose myself to with my persistent running? There is, of course, the inescapable fact of soreness, of sunburns in summer and chapped lips through the winter. There is also an attendant cruelty for my earbud-abstinence, because for some inexplicable reason I have, engrained deep in my subconscious, the tendency to repeat in my head, on loop, for long minutes at a time and regardless of my willing it to stop, Thom Yorke’s wailing chorus from “Creep.”

“At every moment we work to give a shape to our lives, but despite ourselves copy as from a sketch the traits of the person that we are, and not those of the one which we would like to be,” writes Proust in The Guermantes Way. Here is Proust in a somewhat traditional mode, dealing with one of the problems of the 20th-century Bildungsroman, namely what I would refer to, pilfering from Thoreau, as the habit of “quiet desperation.”

 “We work to give a shape to our lives,” and do so always (we think) with a model in mind we would like to achieve. Our great desire is, fundamentally, to become something which we cannot currently recognize ourselves as being. This desire can be noble (the religious desire to become a disciple worthy of heaven) or self-serving (the yuppie’s desire to become a bureaucrat worthy of more stuff). Paths to fulfillment differ, too, with some people pursuing this desire through superior force or strenuous labor and others seeking a more inner realization. But as it stands, everyone is born with the desire to become someone else. It is one desire we may all fulfill; one eventually does become another person, or a whole succession of people, as they grow and wrinkle. (Here I can note something strange about habit, which is that, although it might form a blinding second nature, it does not stop the progression of our first nature through time – in this way it might be said that habit is most like a painkiller, which masks the pain of a broken bone but cannot set the leg…) 

The habit of “quiet desperation” – because it is certainly a habit like any other, being a repeated slip from the first nature of experience, rife with absurdities, cast away from pain – is practiced so generally throughout the human race that it may well be considered a defining feature of our species, common as sentience and breath. “The sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn,” as John Berryman most impressively put it in one of his Dream Songs, yet we have great trouble in confessing this flash-and-yearn business. We cannot seem to confess it to others and eventually some people grow unable to confess it to themselves. 

So I should say that, while we change, we do not every one of us become different people. According to Proust, what is most common is that we copy from a sketch of ourselves. For as badly as one wants to become a different person – sometimes so badly it unsettles one in bed at night – one cannot make the first stroke towards this longed-for self-creation. Our native flash-and-yearn is in need of something not unlike the transmutation of matter. Though a person’s life may, on the outside, follow the pattern of a journey – taking many detours, meeting many people, and finally arriving at some destination or other – the inner life wants for the alchemical (or, if you prefer the modern parlance, the quantum). Mankind’s fundamental desire is for a change of nature, not merely one of place. This is why Proust invokes artistic creation in his quote – to become another person it seems one must be struck with a telegram from the Pantheon, a ring from the muse, that kind of grace that gifts an artist with a truly new vision. The matter we are born with is set on reorganization, not reformation, and lies in a heap waiting for this transcendent touch.

Other writing on literature from “Short Views”:

On Boredom in Literature

On Memorizing Poetry

On the Problem of Seriousness