Feeling miserable over work that fails is preferable to depression which makes work impossible. When I feel overwhelmed by too many things to do, or frustrated by my inability to sustain work over a twenty-four hour day, or unable to keep up with the ideas that rattle in my skull, I suspend discontent by remembering months and years of anguish and lethargy, lying on twisted sheets, painful, too miserable to get out of bed. Oblomov is the textbook, the man who cannot get out of bed. What’s to get up for? Writers are bipolar by nature and by nature extreme. In the years between marriages I remained low, playing at high, through years that were twelve months of winter, blue frost all day all month all year. Thinking of my death was thinking of paradise or at least respite from pain. Self-medication by alcohol gave temporary relief, brief lethal holiday and foretaste of death. (Work, as Oscar Wilde reminds us, is the curse of the drinking classes.) Now if I complain of superabundance I must remember: Too much is so far happier than too little that they do not belong on the same seesaw.

Absorbedness is the paradise of work, but what is its provenance or etiology? Surely it is an ecstasy of transport, of loss of ego; but it is also something less transcendent: To work is to please the powerful masters who are parents—who are family, who are church, who are custom or culture. Not to work is to violate the contract or to disobey the injunction, and to displease the dispensers of supper and love, of praise’s reward. Not working becomes conviction of unworthiness. We prove ourselves worthy by the numbers of work.

When I sold lightbulbs door-to-door for the Andover Lions Club, every October a woman in Danbury told me about how much she had canned that year. She lived in a small rickety cottage, almost a shack, with an old propane cooker. Each year her prodigies increased in prodigiousness. She told me: “This year I did 347 peas, 414 string beans, 77 peaches, 402 corn, 150 strawberry jams …” She talked plain, the New Hampshire way without affect, but I felt pride surging in every century of Ball jars, self-worth assembled in dense rows of vegetable love packed into her root cellar. And as I listened I thrilled with her, felt pride with her and for her. Four hundred cans of corn! Did her family eat four cans of corn each day all winter? Heavens, no. Every time I visited, I took home several examples of her canning.

Once when I was a teacher I took part in a television panel on English composition in California with two other college professors and a high school teacher. We talked about what each of us wanted from our students and how each of us went about the task; we talked about getting through to students by individual conferences and by comments on their papers. After a while the high school teacher—she was a large vigorous forthright forty-year-old—asked some questions: How many students were we speaking of? How many papers did we correct and hand back every week? One of the professors said eighteen, another twenty-two; I handled about twenty papers a week, teaching one section of comp at the University of Michigan. We had an inkling of the point she was making, and one of us asked the question we were asked to ask. “Three hundred and twenty,” she answered.