Ideas - The Endless Procession of Days | Ian Williams

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

How should we fill our time, and what is most important to remember? Giller Prize-winning novelist and poet Ian Williams looks at the meaning of life, work and the relationship between the past and future, inspired by the Crow's Theatre's production of Anton Chekhov's classic drama, Uncle Vanya. *This episode originally aired on March 11, 2024.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. So welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

And welcome to a live taping of of ideas at Crow's Theatre in Toronto, coming to you today from the Mirvish Productions CAA Theatre on Yonge Street. This is the second in our new series. We've invited five stimulating thinkers to give a talk inspired by one of the plays in this year's Crow's Theatre season. The ideas in a play often reflect some of the same ideas that concern and preoccupy all of us, some of the most pressing questions of our time. The second play connected to our series is the Crow's Theatre production of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, is the Crowes Theatre production of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya,

remounted here after a successful run at Crowes Theatre in 2022. In the play, Professor Serebryakov brings his glamorous new wife back to his home in the country. He also brings chaos into the lives of Vanya and Sonia, who manage the estate when he announces his intention to sell. In the final scene of the play, Sonia tries to comfort the despondent Vanya. What can we do, she says. We must live out our lives. Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live all through the endless procession of days ahead of us and through the long evenings. We shall bear patiently the burdens that fate imposes

on us. We shall work without rest for others, both now and when we are old. It's a stark reminder of the relentless march of time and the brevity of our lives, a reflection on how we spend our days on work and the records we keep. And it's the inspiration for today's talk by Ian Williams, Giller Prize-winning novelist and poet. Please join me in welcoming Ian Williams. Good morning, everyone. What a great idea this is. You can go out and you can have brunch. Then you can sort of ingest some ideas for about an hour.

And then you can go see the play, right? And after that, you can lie on the couch and talk about it. So, a wonderful day. The endless procession of days. I keep a daily record of my life. As of today, it stretches back 11 years. You know those free wall calendars that you get at the start of the new year? Well, I use those to keep a daily log. For the last few years, the calendar has come through a charity, so there's a photo each month of someone in a developing country looking needy or grateful. It's never a white person, by the way. The calendar squares are tiny, about one square inch, which means I have to compress the events

of my life into four or five bullets. I don't often review my record, but I keep it compulsively. Day after day, I write the events of my little life into the little squares before turning off the light. Why? Perhaps like a good boy, I worry that one day I will be called upon to account for my time. Someone with a bony finger will point at me

and demand, what were you doing on February 28th, 2024, while two wars raged? And I will have no good answer, true, but I will point feebly to my record of days and say, look, I did something, of days and say, look, I did something, suffering neutral. So let's look at February 28th over the years. 11 years ago, the calendar says degree development meeting, Elle's birthday, had lunch with R, talked with P for a long time in the art gallery, went to bank, re-savings account. Some woes, told mom. Again, this was over a decade ago, so an update is in order. I'm no longer in touch with L, P, or R. The savings account has since been transferred to another institution. And most disturbingly, I have no recollection of what the woes were that I told mom about. Like, what's the point of a record if it does not hold a memory? So I went rooting around the days

for context. Apparently, I had a haircut two days before and a diversity meeting as well. I'll leave it to you to figure out which of those two is responsible for the woes. at which of those two is responsible for the woes. One day is not discreet from another, is it? The woes of one day weigh on the next and the next. It's as if we carry the accumulated griefs of all our days. I'd like to say pleasures too, but the griefs feel heavier and the pleasure is so light that they evaporate into ephemera. I suppose that 11 years ago, I had a suffering neutral day, in the sense that I was still suffering over something, the woes, and forgive my childish logic, that means that someone else could suffer less in the global suffering economy, if only life worked that way.

February 28th, 10 years ago, I graded portfolios, converted some U.S. money, and got an email from C. After that thrilling report, you may be questioning my purposes. Chances are no bony figure will point at me. Yet I still feel a sense of accountability to whom or what I can't say. I mean, my grandparents lived into their 90s and felt no need to document their days. I have no record of my great-grandparents or my great-great-grandparents, the endless procession

of their days. It's a problem familiar to black folks. And though I can imagine what life was like for them I wish I could know the name of the cow That didn't survive the hurricane I wish they wrote it down or told someone about their days So to whom or what am I accountable? I suppose I feel a sense of accountability To the future February 28th, nine years ago, I took a long nap. This is high drama, people. Now that I look back,

I can't help but wonder whether this record of my days is, in fact, an act of hubris. is, in fact, an act of hubris. Look at me. Look at how disciplined I am. Every single day I keep this record. Or am I doing this to prove that I can commit? It's like maintaining a Duolingo or Snapchat streak. If I could commit to keeping my record of days, this small act of faithfulness,

then perhaps I could commit to a large act of faithfulness, like marriage. Yes, that must be it. This record proves that I could get married and stay married for up to 11 years. That's more bad logic. February 28th, eight years ago, I did a radio interview, no recollection. I had a board meeting, couldn't tell you which board. My mother helped me pick out a sofa, and the Oscars were on. That was a leap year. It says here on Monday, February 29th, I bought a rug at HomeSense. It was gray and very shaggy, and has since been sold somewhat reluctantly on Kijiji. I actually have photos of me in this rug. I loved it so much.

My condo had closed the previous month, January 12th, to be exact, the day after David Bowie died, and both are recorded, of course. I should point out that the calendars around these years were model suite calendars from those free condo magazines that you find inside newspaper boxes on the sidewalk. The image for February 2016 is of a wall kitchen, stainless steel appliances, beige cabinets, white island with two bar stools. The caption says, a landmark building in a landmark location.

I wonder how much that unit sold for then and how much it would sell for now. Someone told me that house prices double every 10 years. Oh dear, you say. This guy intends to read me his agenda for the last 10 years. It's beyond mundane. It's the equivalent of scrolling Instagram to see photos of people's meals. So let's shift here and talk about something else. Let's talk about how we spend a lot of our time, about 90,000 hours of it, a full third of our lives. That's at work. The two most common ways of asking somebody about their work is, of asking somebody about their work is, what do you do? And where do you work? The second question suggests that work happens elsewhere, outside of the home. We go to work. One phrase

like that, we mean both a location and an action. We go to work a place, and we go there to work the action we intend to perform. In other words, we go to work to work. Naturally, the expectation that work happens elsewhere negates a whole class of work. Domestic work, caregiving work, childbearing work, work usually performed by women are all relegated to irrelevance. The boundary between such work and the life of the worker is blurry. Big companies know how to work the blurry line between work and life to their advantage. Big tech companies are known for designing elements of play into their work environments. Google offices have climbing walls, slides, basketball courts, pool tables, foosball tables, libraries, miniature golf courses, DJ booths, nap pods, pools.

And until hearing that, most of us were quite satisfied with the office coffee maker and occasional treats in the break room. Companies know that if workers are enjoying themselves with various diversions at the office and find the work they do stimulating, they're more likely to stay in the mode of work. The idea, according to a New York Times article, is that since people like working from home, these companies bring home to the office. bring home to the office. During the pandemic, it was inevitable that we work from home. For the first time for many of us, we saw what true flexibility looked like.

The mandatory in-person meeting could indeed be had on Zoom, thank you very much. Think back. Were you more or less productive during that time? On one hand, you didn't have to commute. You could work during your peak energy times. You were more comfortable. You didn't have to make makeup or wardrobe or even basic hygiene decisions. But on the other hand, commuting hours became extra working hours. And more generally, the work itself became meaningless in light of the death, uncertainty, and anxiety around us. Its meaninglessness also made it less urgent. There was no extra time as we imagined,

just deferral, procrastination, choppy periods of concentration and distraction. And importantly, there was the exhaustion that resulted from working at all hours of the day without an external imperative to stop. No train to catch, no building to leave. According to an article in The Economist, most of us worked more during the pandemic. The subtitle of the article is, working from home is less liberating than many hoped. Reports of people working less during the pandemic resulted from cases where they were laid off, temporarily or permanently,

and you can predict the demographic intersections of the people who were most acutely impacted by layoffs. Back to the question that led us here. Where do you work? Imagine how differently the world would organize itself if instead of talking about work as a place we go, I'm going to the office, I'm going to the university, I'm going to the mall, I'm going to the hospital. If we spoke about what we were leaving behind. I'm leaving home now. I'm leaving my family. I'm leaving myself. I'm leaving you. This, I think, is how children understand our work.

Let's proceed to the second question. What do you do? I have a friend who dislikes this question. What do you do? It's smug, he said, and irrelevant in small talk conversations. They think they're being clever, but what they're really asking is, how much money do you make? I'm not my income. It's like I'm a kid again, and they're sizing me up to see if they could beat me up near the playscape. In short, my friend feels like the question does not account for him as a person. Some essential part of him feels dismissed. So I asked him, what would you like folks to say instead?

Ask about my interests. I ask people what they're reading. He sounded so sophisticated in that moment, enlightened, above the rest of us who were harvesting our computers in the office fields. I thought, but did not say, that asking what are you reading is just as smug as asking what do you do. Only instead of using work to determine one's economic value, he was using books to determine whether they were cultured or not. The cultural scale

is still a metric, though admittedly not as crass as the economic scale. He didn't want to be measured financially, but he was okay with being measured culturally. We all want to be judged by criteria that show us in the most flattering light. I should point out that we have the option of answering the question differently. So, what do you do? We could say, yo, I do a lot of things. I make granola, I prune my shrubs, I walk the dog, I binge watch anime, I go to the Dominican Republic once a year.

You could list your pleasures instead of your money makers, your duties. But you and I know that such a response would be facetious. The stranger would stare at us for a moment, wait for the joke to pass. Then, if they were determined enough, rephrase the question. Yeah, right, but where do you work? What do you do? What do I do? I think about this from time to time. I mean, if we had to find another word for work, for what we do, what would it be?

I could speak in terms of action. I write, I teach, I follow the dictates of email, I process information, I decide, I solve, I respond. More loftily, I imagine, I design, I invent. More mechanically, I sit, I type, I talk. And there's no word to describe what I feel some days. It's like I'm working, but I feel stalled, pedaling on a stationary bike. I never actually get to the real work,

although I've been sitting in front of my screen all morning. And tomorrow I won't be able to remember what I did today. That thought alone deflates me. My first pass at work feels like my brain is a giant sieve trolling the ocean for fish. Then, as if in a dream, in the next pass, I'm plucking low-hanging fruit. These items tend to be trivial, but they give me the illusion of accomplishment because they're so easy to clear. Problem is, by the time I fill my basket with this fruit, I have no energy to climb the tree. What's the word for all of that?

The Japanese word karoshi means something like death by overwork. A Guardian article gives the story of Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old woman in an advertising company. She has unfortunately become the poster story for Karoshi. She worked more than 100 hours of overtime, overtime, in a single month. She was sleeping 10 hours a week. Before she died by suicide, she posted, I want to die. I'm physically and mentally shattered. That was in December 2015. In 2016, the Japanese government reported that 20% of its labor force, or one in five workers, was at risk for karoshi. These deaths take the form of heart attacks, strokes, and suicide.

the form of heart attacks, strokes, and suicide. Still in Japan, the opposite prospect for a life is an equally terrifying problem among the young. People already so disillusioned by the salaryman life that they opt out of work and out of social life altogether. They have a word for that too. Hikikimori. We translate it as hermit, recluse, shut-in, or we pathologize it as people with social withdrawal syndrome. Here's a quotation from the Telegraph. Last November, which was 2022, a government study estimated that nearly 1.5 million people in Japan were living as recluses, defined as living in

isolation within their homes for at least six months, while a report in March this year cited one in 50 people aged 15 to 64 with hikikomori in a broad sense of the term. To address the problem, in 2021, Japan created the post of minister for loneliness and isolation i guess hikikomori is not the exact opposite of karoshi it is not death by underwork it is a kind of retirement in an alternate meaning of the word retire it is a life not just emptied of work, but of everything else. It is doing nothing for a living. Let's proceed from unbearable work to unshareable work. When I say to someone, say my dental hygienist, that I'm a professor, I toggle between writer and professor depending on the crowd. She responds with pleasant

satisfaction. Oh yeah? What do you teach? English, I say. Then there's a pause before they recount their English class experiences, which could have been 40 years ago. Sometimes they light up as if I had started singing a song from their youth. Generally, there's mild indifference, though. Oh, that whole English thing is still going on, huh? Hamlet and Macbeth and all that. And from there, the conversation goes to, where do you teach? I say, University of Toronto or wherever. And there's usually enough common ground by this point for us to talk about something else totally.

A nephew in university, the plight of international students, the plagiarism scandal, whatever is topical. No one really asks how I spend my days, my 10 o'clocks and two o'clocks, and I'm not sure I'd know how to respond if the bony finger demanded to know. Most people see the tip of the iceberg, the standing in front of class's teaching part. And that's fair. I don't know what hygienists do beyond my teeth, but I'm sure there's a dark electronic side of record keeping. We have assumptions of each other. I assume my hygienist flosses and never forgets to sleep with her mouth guard. She assumes that my colleagues

and I are pontificating about Chekhov, and if not, that we're swanning around Vienna at a conference. In a sense, it's almost impossible to account for our time, to share what we do for work. Instead, we grant each other the right to be mysterious in the 10 o'clocks and 2 o'clocks of our work days. I could rant about how the nitty-gritty of work feels meaningless, is meaningless, but do we have a right to complain? My life is not in danger like the police or journalists in some regions or medical staff during the pandemic. I should be grateful. And now I'm tempted to rant about the trap of gratitude when it's deployed as a way to silence dissatisfaction. You have a good job. You should be grateful. You're not working in a sweatshop trying to meet a quota of designer bags,

which now makes me want to rant about the doctrine of productivity. now makes me want to rant about the doctrine of productivity. Do more and do it faster and ye shall be rewarded. There are many self-help books in airports about these problems. The point here, though, is that our relationship to work flips back and forth between meaning and meaninglessness, gratitude and resentment Productivity and ennui. Speaking of ennui, you know where I'm going. February 28th, six years ago. According to my record of days, I played tennis with S, and then I played tennis with a ball machine.

Same day, 2019, I left my wallet at home. There's also an indecipherable bullet. It looks like am afraid or am afday or am a fan or am a fad. I don't need to tell you that February is Black History Month. The shortest month I know we're all aware of the performed exasperation, but for some of us, the month continues on and on beyond its days. For example, here's something that did not make itself into my record of days. Recently, I came home and there was a guy sitting in a car parked in my driveway. I motioned to him outside his window and alarm spread across his face. When I asked him if he was there to view the rental unit, I could see him doing some mental computation about my blackness, the house owner, carjackings. It was all there on his face before it composed itself. As I said, I don't want that in my record of days. But I did squander the remainder of that day,

wondering whether I could rent to someone whose initial response to me was terror, or whether I was exercising a form of discrimination by making a decision simply based on a look I received. But there was no decision to make. He was not interested in renting the unit. He had his reasons, too. Yet something tells me that he didn't lose an evening wondering why he was so terrifying to the world. Circle back in time, February 28th, 2020. It says here, I went to Canadian Tire. I painted a wall. The next day, because it was a leap year,

I talked to a friend for three hours outside his condo, as if starved for company. It was pandemic time, remember, but we, I should mention he's also black, did not talk much about the pandemic for those three hours that night. Let's proceed to something else. If you read each square of my record of days, you will notice that I don't actually record the details of work unless I achieve something impressive or meaningful. How do people work in art and entertainment? When you watch people work on TV, all the ennuis edited out or it was never written in. On The Office, for example, we see people at their desks, but it's not really a show about work. we see people at their desks, but it's not really a show about work. It's about all the interstitial moments that occur during the day. Few paintings are interested in work, except maybe among the Dutch. As for music, Rihanna mumbles through a song, work, work, work, work, work, but chances are you're

more likely to find a pop song about banging on a drum all day than about averaging a column in Excel. The novelist David Foster Wallace tried to write about tax accountants in the IRS in The Pale King, his novel. The book was 592 pages when he died and incomplete. It includes sections of IRS tax code. On stage in Uncle Vanya, Astrov excitedly talks about his conservation project, but Elena cannot hide her boredom. He says to her coldly,

I see by your expression this does not interest you. Defending herself, she replies, but I understand so little of it. And Astrov responds, there replies, but I understand so little of it. And Astroff responds, there's nothing here to understand. It's simply not interesting, you. In general, the work parts of work are excised in art and entertainment.

It's usually just an identity marker for a character or setting for a story. So it comes as no surprise that we excise the daily tasks from our identities. We suppress the mundane tasks so thoroughly from our self-concept that our families can't even imagine us in action. Maybe you had a parent like that, one who was invisible during the workday, even if you tried to conjure them. Let's proceed. Here are three more schedules for you.

I grew up with Benjamin Franklin's little jingle for productivity. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. My parents said, a boy. That's the way they gave it to me. And Benjamin Franklin didn't play around. In his autobiography, he leaves us his daily schedule. Contrast it against your own, and you'll feel like a slacker. From 5 to 7 a.m., the plan was, rise, wash, and address powerful goodness.

Contrive day's business and take the resolution of the day Prosecute the present study And breakfast From 8 to 11 He works From 12 to 2 he reads And looks at his accounts and dines From 2 to 5 he puts in another

Work shift From 6 to 10 the schedule says Put things in their places, supper, music or diversion, or conversation, examination of the day. From 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., he sleeps. Interestingly, if you cut out the details, Franklin frames his day around two questions. The morning question, what good shall I do today? These days we might call that setting an intention for the day. His evening question is, what good have I done today? And we would call that a reflection.

Maybe I should start asking those questions at the edges of my day instead of getting on a treadmill, a moving belt like George Jetson, and responding to whatever gets thrown my way. Proceeding, The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous character Gatsby is also in the mold of Benjamin Franklin. He too keeps a schedule. Here's how he goes from rags to riches, or in Franklin's words, how he becomes healthy, wealthy, and wise. 6 a.m., rise from bed. 6.15, dumbbell exercise and wall scaling. 7.15, study electricity, etc. 8.30 to 4.30 p.m., work. 4.30, baseball and sports. 5 to 6, practice elocution, poise, and how to attain it, 7 to 9, study needed inventions. Gatsby also lists general resolves, no wasting time at shafters,

no more smoking or chewing, tobacco we presume. Bath every other day. Read one improving book or magazine per week. Save five dollars, crossed out, three dollars per week. Be better to parents. These are two men. They seem in control of their day, their time. They move forward with confidence and reap the results of what they might call discipline, but we might recognize as a structural bias toward male self-determination. Consider the day of the protagonist in a novel by Catherine Hernandez, The Story of Us. First of all, it doesn't fit tidily on one page. It goes on for 10 pages. This is the day of a Filipina caregiver. I'll give you just a little bit. Mary Grace Concepcion, or Ma, officially wakes at 5.45, although she was disturbed throughout

the night by the baby. She makes individual breakfast for each member of the family. She wakes the kids. She feeds the kids. She manages medication. She plays quietly with the children so as not to disturb the parents. She manages the daily tantrum from the child when the mother goes to work. All of that before 8 a.m. At 8, notice this. Quote, in the sweet spot when the parents are both in their respective offices working and children are happily playing, go into the kitchen and prepare the snack bag. In other words, it is Ma's labor that allows two affluent parents to pursue their ambitions.

The parents' offices, by the way, are both upstairs in the home. The rest of her day involves wrangling kids out of the way, are both upstairs in the home. The rest of her day involves wrangling kids out of the house, going to play centers, changing diapers, pleading, negotiating with kids, preparing all meals, cleaning the kitchen, managing bedtime routines, and doing it all as invisibly as possible so the parents are not disturbed. The schedule in the story of us is not written down by Ma. She has no time. Her life disappears. Disappears. These days, it's inevitable that we leave behind some record of ourselves, whether we like it or not. We leave behind agendas and calendars, but a more surreptitious record is being kept of you

in the form of your viewing history, your listening history, your searches, your likes, your purchases. The American poet Ocean Vuong reconstituted his mother based on her digital footprint. The poem is called Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker, The poem is called Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker, and it's simply a list of objects that she bought online, organized by month, sort of like my calendar. Here's a short section. September.

Nail buffers and files, ten pieces. Coppertone sunblock, six ounces. March. Chemo glab, cotton headscarf. Sunrise pink. White socks, women's small, 12-pack. The poet's mother died months later. This digital record may lack warmth,

but it's one way of remembering her. Shall I proceed with one final blast from the past? February 28th, a Sunday. The calendar features a picture of a smiling man wearing a colorful towel around his neck like a scarf. He looks like a manual laborer. The photo was taken just after the 2018 Lombok earthquake in Indonesia, but my tiny square of life is dated years afterward. It says, drumroll, that I went for a long walk. This was during the pandemic. Just staying alive another day was an accomplishment. I wonder if the man in the photo survived the pandemic.

I don't think that day was suffering neutral for me. I don't think my life is suffering neutral. February 28th, the next year. I jackhammered tile during a basement renovation and bought baseboards in quarter rounds. February 28th, the next year. I was paying a contractor $5,000 to finish the renovation. This was just last year. That brings us to now. Well, not now, the future. Or if you're listening

to this, the past. February is the shortest month, yet in the middle of winter it feels interminable, an endless procession of dark, cold days. How much soup can a person eat to get through them? It doesn't really matter. Today, whatever the date, I'm talking to you. The days that we can do this are numbered. On Ideas, you've been listening to The Endless Procession of Days by Giller Prize winning novelist and poet Ian Williams at the CAA Theatre in Toronto. You can hear Ideas

wherever you get your podcasts. And on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Ayed. It's actually more fun telling it to people

rather than reading it to myself in the studio. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is the second in a new series we've developed with Crowes Theatre in Toronto, an opportunity

to explore some of the ideas that animate great theatre. The Crowes Theatre production of Anton Chekhov's play, Uncle Vanya, playing right now at the CAA Theatre, is marked by the frustration of unfulfilled lives and the relentless march of time, the inspiration for the talk we've just heard from Ian Williams. So now I will have a few questions for Ian, and then we're going to throw it to you, the audience. If you have a question, please write it down on one of the cards that the ushers are handing out, and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible. Once again, Ian, thank you so much for such a wonderful presentation. A pleasure, a pleasure to just think about these things, yeah. You took us on quite a journey through time and place.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that one line in the famous speech by Sonia where she talks about the endless procession of days. What is it about that phrase that caught your attention? Yeah, because they sort of string together and we call it a life at the end, right? But while we're living them, it's hard to kind of know how to separate our time and how to mark it. By year, by day, by month, by summers, by season, it's hard to know. And she says this procession of days, it feels like ants following each other, like into an anthill or somewhere.

It felt like a train or something. And what I like about that speech is it's about hope, but it feels very like performed, right? It feels like you've been duped into hoping, right? You shouldn't look forward to working for someone for the rest of your life. You shouldn't look forward to this promised reward that is endlessly deferred. You've bought into something that actually won't bring you happiness or satisfaction. And so there's a kind of blindering or blinkering that happens

where you just focus on the days. If you can get through today and tomorrow and the next day, then you won't have to think about, oh, I've fallen prey to this illusion. It's imbued with resignation. Yeah. It feels like you're being sentenced to, you know, a life sentence. Yeah.

It's both hope and resignation, right? In that, right? So we can hope and then we're resigned to whatever fate is at the end, at the front of that ant line, you know? I was also really struck by your comment that, I'll just quote you, that one day is not discreet from another, that the events of one day influence and weigh on the next and the next. It's something that we kind of know intrinsically, but we don't really think about. Is it kind of a reminder that the calendars and the divisions that we all live

with, the weeks and the months, that those are really a construct? Yeah, it would be kind of cool if we swept away this calendar and sort of came up with another system of marking our time, right? There are other ways, right? Seasons and birthdays, and we mark time in various ways. But for me, like the days kind of bleed into each other. This kind of keeps me focused, right? What have I achieved today? What have I accomplished today? It's sort of the reverse of my calendar, my agenda. But there are other ways of sort of the reverse of my calendar, my agenda. But there are other ways of sort of thinking about our time. And actually, the older I get, I'm not old by any stretch, but the older I get, the larger the unit becomes. So when you're a kid,

you know, like the summer feels like forever. We know that experience very well. But now the years go by pretty quickly, right? On this kind of like acceleration of time, the older that you get. And so if you asked me when I was 22 to say, wait three years to publish that book or whatever, I'd say, three years? I'm going to be a totally different person in three years. I can't wait three years. I need to get this done now.

But now three years down the road, I was like, yeah, that's good. Mortgage will be renewed in three years. It will be upward. Not so daunting. Right, right, right. The time feels shorter. You make reference to what you call our accountability to the future.

Where does that come from, that need to be accountable to the future? Yeah, strangely it comes from the past, right, from not having a past. And, you know, every family has the person who keeps the record for the family. Are you that person? Involuntarily, I think I am. And so I sort of look back and, like, how far back can I go and what do I know about the people in my family? And I did the DNA test and all of that stuff, right, trying to get to something.

And I feel like, okay, if I can't go that far into the past, then the past starts here, right? And so I'm trying to sort of build forward. But yeah, it started with sort of looking at the past, not having a past. Thank you also for reminding us that not everyone has a history that can be recovered. I'm sure others here can also relate to the fact

that when you said that there are no records for your great-great-grandparents and the endless procession of their days. How do you think that shapes your sense of the importance of actually accounting for your days? Yeah. So I spoke about it in terms of blackness, but there are all sorts of reasons why we might be cut off from our family and our history, right? Adoptions and wars and all sorts of things. But it does sort of make me sensitive, right? It does sort of say, I don't have children, likely I won't have children, right? So there's not necessarily the passing on of a direct line there. But there's a sense of, if it's not specific to my family, it's still for the good of like humankind to know what it was like to be in this kind of body at that particular time and we've got all sorts of videos these days we've got instagram we've got social media we've

got all these other kinds of records but i mean a more thoughtful and reflective record than one that just kind of records reality one that can sort of preserve our interior landscapes is what i'm hoping for yeah you asked us to are you or you told us that we would understand why you did not record that incident of the man in your driveway. Perfectly understandable why you wouldn't want that in your record. But I wonder what not recording it says about the importance of the act of accounting for your day. Yeah, I can afford not to record that because there's so many instances like that, right? And they've been recorded. And I don't want my life, my procession

to be a series of these kinds of like aggressions. And so I can, what a terrible thing to pick and choose from, right? I can pick and choose the sort of horrible like indignities that happen on a daily basis. But the fact that you hold that memory in such a vivid way says something about whether we really need to account for these things or not. Yeah, and who at this point, right? Who accounts for it? So is this my problem?

Is this his problem? Is this like a social problem? Like the responsibility for that particular encounter gets so diffused, right? That it's hard to know whose record of days that should be in, but maybe not mine. But it should be in a record of days somewhere.

It should be in somebody's, yeah. Maybe like the Canadian Consciousness record of days, right? If we had sort of a national record of all of our days, that's where it belongs. Yeah, yeah. When you talk about work, the idea that we should reframe it kind of less about where we're going or what we're going to do and more about what we're leaving behind leaving ourselves leaving you is this possibly the only good thing to come out of the covid era oh that's neat nala well it's your idea but hearing it back from you, right? Like you've turned it into something else.

This kind of rethinking of work. I mean, that's really kind of the lasting legacy so far. Obviously, a lot of tragedy, but in terms of those of us who have survived it, that seems to be the lasting legacy, no? Yeah, there's a kind of like agency, I think, in reframing it, right? Like if I'm thinking about what am I leaving behind

and who's making me do this, it's possible for me to opt to work from home. And the kind of work that I do has a very different kind of texture when I'm at home. But the stakes become so much more clear when I say, in order to afford this house or whatever, I'm leaving behind breakfast in a sunny kitchen every day. I'm leaving behind my health, right, because I'm not exercising. I'm just sitting in front of my desk. And when it says, what am I losing

in order to gain sort of materially? Then it can sort of sharpen and sort of make us, help us make better decisions. Yeah, that's the hope, right? But I don't know if collectively, if it's such a hard thing to ask for people to sort of rewire their ways

of sort of thinking about this, right? We've been on this treadmill from the time we were in high school, about sort of going to college and getting good jobs and making good money and buying houses and all of that. And then to like in midlife say, I want off of that.

And I don't know what else, because there is no other pattern that's being like advanced or presented to us right and I wish we had other sort of options and patterns for lives that we could sort of choose so you're saying we're basically snapping back it's hard it's hard not to yeah it feels that way doesn't it yeah

yeah and I don't know the end point of this right we're still sort of thinking in that direction I don't know what that would look like in 15 or 20 years. We know about sort of labor shortages, and we know about people opting out, like in Japan. And to an extreme, none of those things is healthy, you know? But somewhere in there, there's probably a work-life balance that's more suitable and humane for us. It's so strange that there isn't a word like, is it karoshi? A karoshi, yeah. that there isn't an English word I guess over work it's not the same and I think it's probably strategic that there's not an English word

for that, right? because if there's not a word there, we don't have that concept we can keep working and working and working and we can work at home and we can work at work and we can work on the train and we can work everywhere and at all times and feel good about it. But to identify it, to find a minister to address the problem, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think if people can't see it here, then we're not likely to do anything about it.

You end off your lecture with a kind of exasperation that it's impossible to account for time. And yet people in the past didn't seem to need that, you know, didn't have that compulsion. They didn't care so much about time. They functioned without clocks. They didn't even, some didn't even know when they were born. Why do you think accounting for time in our time matters so much? Yeah, partly it's the inevitability of it right now, right? And so it's a sort of rest control from sort of tech companies that say, no, I'm going to account for it in my own way. And based on the things that I see important, I'm not going to include the things that trouble me or whatever, but on my terms, I want to account for my time and not to be marketed to

or whatever. I think that's one thing, right? So to resist that. But also, I think there's something just about, I don't know, like the human project, there's something just about i don't know like the human project right of just kind of you know like how many people say to me i i have a book in me right i have something in me people have this thing that they want to leave behind they see their lives as like intrinsically worthwhile right and worthwhile not just to them in the experience of living but worthwhile to other people in the experience of sharing. I think there was at some point in my mother's life where her attention turned from sort of moving forward to like turning back on us kids, my brother and me, and just sort of telling us everything, telling us too much all the time. And I think there's something, some kind of fulcrum or some kind of turning point where you're like, I've done so much. I've had

so many experiences and now I need to sort of share this or give this back or package it and present it in my own way. Yeah. So when you, I mean, thank you for sharing so much of your record with us tonight, today. It's just one day. But in your mind's eye, where does all of that reside after you're done with it? After I die or after I'm done with it? I didn't want to say after you die, but that's what I meant. What's the future for that? What should be the future? I mean, where does that reside and to whose benefit?

Yeah, I don't know physically who gets that in the end. And it's quite possible that a nephew or a niece would sort of say, oh, here's some more of his trash papers. Let's burn this. It's possible that the next generation might not see the value in that. And they just pursue the digital records that don't take up their space. But I don't know. In one sense, I don't care too much.

And I know I should be invested. I care that it exists, and I care that the future has the option of using it however they want to use it. And my duty right now is just to keep the record and not sort of wonder about its purposes in the future. Yeah, if I'm faithful about sort of keeping and preserving that,

I will have done my part, I think. One last thing I want to share with you is this fear I had as I was listening to you, of you writing down about today on February 25th, 2024, gave talk at theatre and then not remembered. What happened that day? Oh, that would be heartbreaking. It would be. There's an archive, there's a record, I would remember.

I'd remember this. Some things you do remember. Yeah. So many more questions I have for you, but I'll stop there and grab the audience's questions. Thank you, Ian, for my questions. Thanks, Donna. I'm ready for the audience's questions, if someone can just bring them over.

Here we go. Thank you so much for these questions, everyone. Okay. This is an excellent question, because it did come up a couple these questions, everyone. Okay. This is an excellent question because it did come up a couple of times, Ian. What do you mean by suffering neutral? Oh, yeah. Suffering neutral, right?

The sense that the privilege that I have here is somehow unmerited or accidental or random, right? To sort of be born on this continent. And if I were born in a lower caste in India or something, my life to sort of be born on this continent. And if I were born in, you know, in a lower caste in India or something, my life would be totally different. So there's this sense of kind of like weighing the luck that I have against something else. You know, I think we all have this kind of sense of guilt, like what right do I have to be eating salted caramel ice cream when, you know, what's going on elsewhere in the world and i feel

it's poor logic okay and i said that that if i deny myself that that salted caramel lot ice cream then somehow i'm in tandem with the suffering of other people you know like my little tiny deprivation here somehow connects me or reminds me yeah the scale is totally different of of other people's suffering yeah i need to i want to think more about that right but i just implicitly you know these childhood games that you play with yourself that don't quite make make sense but they give you a kind of comfort they soothe you in a way to make you feel like you're doing something um yeah first thought then action yeah okay uh some philosophers say that happiness is best achieved by living in the moment how would

you reconcile this view with your thoughts on documenting your life and having hope for the future yeah the carpe diem kind of thing seize the day be be present and all of that yeah i've got friends who are very good at being present right it's like every minute seize the day, be present, and all of that. Yeah, I've got friends who are very good at being present, right? Like every minute of the day, their attention is just always like alert, and they're noticing like light through the leaves, and they're noticing the scents of things. And I always walk around with a slightly glazed look, right? Looking inward and like looking outward.

But I think generally I live in the future, and my happiness lies in sort of like the hope for the future. Not in Sonia's kind of way, right? But in imagining that tomorrow will be better and I will do this and I will do that. So I'm a big planner. I make a lot of plans for the future and I think that's where I'm happiest.

In the potential of things rather than in the sort of unchangeable present of things. I suppose you could be in the moment while planning for the future. Yeah, yeah. I just prefer to be in the future. With the huge amount of our life at work, how do we find work-life balance? What is quote-unquote balance? Yeah, I don't have an answer for that.

I tend to overwork, so I'm not really good at the work-life balance. I'm aware that such a thing exists, like Guam, you know, but I've never actually been there. So, yeah, that's a question for someone who's more in the present and probably more mindful about these things. But I also enjoy my work, and that's the difficulty too, right? When you really enjoy the thing that you do, and so your work feels like your life and your pleasures and all of that.

So it gets really tangled. Yeah. Where do you think the impulse to categorize and compartmentalize our time comes from? Is it an attempt to impose meaning on what is fundamentally unknowable? Someone woke up early. That's part of the question. Right. Yeah, where this impulse comes from to categorize.

I mean, we do have to account at regular intervals. There's sort of performance reviews, and when you're in school, there are these tests that you must do to show how you've spent your time studying. Have you acquired the concept or whatever? So it's kind of baked into how we live, these periodic checks that you have not been idle. And so I think that becomes internalized at some level or another. Maybe we reject it outright sometimes and say, you know, I'm just going to cut

loose for a weekend or whatever. But no, this sense of being a responsible citizen and all of that, it's like baked in to account. Ian Williams, thank you so much. Really great to talk to you. Thank you. Thanks, Nala. Thanks, Nala.

On Ideas, you've been listening to The Endless Procession of Days, a talk by Ian Williams, the second in a series of talks inspired by great plays produced in association with Crow's Theatre in Toronto. This program was recorded at the CAA Theatre in Toronto, where the Crow's Theatre production of Uncle Vanya is playing. Ideas at Crow's Theatre is produced by Philip Coulter

and Pauline Holdsworth. Special thanks to Paolo Santalucia, Chris Abraham, Kerry Sager, and the entire Crow's Theatre team. Ad Ideas, technical production by Danielle Duval. The web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. Thank you all so much for being here today. Really great to have you here. Thank you. Enjoy. Thank you. Enjoy. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. You're so wonderful.

So enjoyable. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.