The Weight of the Possible
granted the power to do anything, he can no longer rest.
What Ferro received was the removal of every distance between the wish and the deed, and he mistook it, at first, for a gift.
He never learned where it came from, or whether it had been given or merely arrived; these are not the questions one asks of a thing once one has it. He knew only that there was a day before and a day after. Before, the world had been made of friction — of beginnings that resisted, of the cold engine of a morning that would not turn over until he had cranked at it, of the long unlovely labour between deciding to do a thing and the thing being done, the gathering of tools, the setting-up, the false starts, the gap. After, the gap was gone. Whatever he turned his mind to was, in the turning, already begun; whatever he resolved to make was, in the resolving, already half-made and asking to be finished; the distance between I might and it is had been quietly abolished, so that a thought of doing became a doing without anything in between for him to rest in. He had spent his life cursing that in-between, the drag, the cost of starting. He did not yet know it had been holding the world at a survivable distance.
For a week he was happy. He did everything. The small undone tasks of years fell in an afternoon; the letters he had never begun wrote themselves out of him; the thing he had always meant to build stood built by evening, and he walked around it, and it was good, and he was, for the length of one breath, satisfied — and in that breath he saw, standing finished before him, the three further things the finished thing now made possible, each of them no longer distant, each of them already tugging at his sleeve, already half-begun in the back of his mind, and he understood, with the first cold of it, that he was not going to be allowed to rest.
It was not the doing that broke him. He wished, afterward, that people would understand this, though there was no one to tell. Nothing was hard. That was precisely the horror of it — that the difficulty, which he had always taken for the enemy, had in fact been the friend, the wall that kept the flood out, and now the wall was down.
The suffering was the presence of everything at once. Every possible deed stood up in him fully alive, none of them dimmed by the labour they would have cost, because they would cost no labour; and a possibility that costs nothing to begin does not lie down. It presses. He would finish one thing and it would bloom, at the instant of finishing, into three more now within reach, and those three, attended to, into nine, and the list of what he might do swelled faster than the list of what he had done, always faster, a tide coming in over a beach that could not widen, so that the more he completed the further he fell behind the completable, the gap between the done and the could-do opening wider with every closing of it. He had thought a man could empty such a list by working hard enough. He learned that the list was not a thing you emptied. It was a thing the absence of friction fed.
He stopped sleeping, or slept as a man sleeps with a bell ringing in the next room — because there was no longer any such thing as a thought he could afford to let pass. Before, a notion would come to him and he would not act on it, and it would fade, and the not-acting had been free, had been most of life, in fact, the great warm sea of intentions never carried out in which a person floated and called it living. Now no notion faded. Each one, arriving, was already actionable, already beginning, and to let it pass he had to actively kill it, push it down, hold it under, and a man cannot hold under everything that surfaces in a mind, not all day, not every day. So he acted. He acted and acted, not from desire any longer but from the simple unendurable fact that the undone was right there, weightless, instant, asking, and the asking did not stop.
He went to see a man he had once known, an old maker of clocks named Quist, because Quist was the slowest person Ferro had ever met and Ferro had begun, without quite admitting it, to hunger after slowness the way a parched man hungers after water.
Quist worked at a bench by a window, and he was, when Ferro came in, doing nothing — sitting with a small brass wheel in his fingers, not fitting it, not filing it, only turning it in the light, and Ferro felt his whole body strain toward the wheel, toward the fitting of it, because the fitting was so obviously possible, was already half-done in his hands though the hands were Quist's.
"You could finish that in a moment," Ferro said. It came out of him almost as a complaint.
"I could have finished it yesterday," Quist said, and did not look up. "I am deciding whether it wants to be finished. That is the part of the work the work cannot do for you." He turned the wheel once more. "Most things I could make, I don't. A man who made everything he could make would drown the world in clocks. The skill is not in the making. Any fool with a file can make. The skill is in the not — in letting the most of it alone, so the little you do keep has somewhere to stand."
Ferro said nothing. He was watching the wheel turn in the old man's fingers, watching a possibility be held, unhurried, in the open palm of a man who felt no compulsion to close his hand on it, and he understood that Quist possessed, by long discipline and a whole life's practice, the one thing Ferro's gift had taken from him: the ability to let a possible thing remain merely possible, to let it sit, half-formed, breathing, unmade, for as long as it took to know whether it deserved to be made at all.
"You're not happy," Quist said, still to the wheel. "Men who can do anything never are. It isn't the doing that makes a life. It's the choosing of the few. You've lost the choosing. You do everything that knocks, and a man who answers every door has no house — only a corridor, with everyone walking through."
Ferro left, and for a long time he did not understand what to do with what Quist had said, because the gift did not permit understanding to sit any more than it permitted anything else to sit; the understanding, arriving, immediately wanted to be acted on, and he had to learn — slowly, against the whole grain of the thing he had been given — that there were truths you could not act your way into, that could only be reached by not acting, by holding still while the tide came in and refusing to wade.
So he began the only work that was left to him, which was the hardest work he had ever done, and which consisted entirely of leaving things undone.
He let a thought stay a thought. The first time it nearly killed him; the unacted possibility burned in him all afternoon, demanding, weightless, right there — and he sat with it, and did not move, and watched it, and toward evening, for the first time in a long time, it faded, the way notions had faded before the gift came, and in its fading he felt something he had forgotten the taste of, which was rest. He had let one possible thing die unmade, and the world had not ended, and the dying of it had given him back an hour. He did it again the next day, with two. The discipline was not in the doing — nothing was difficult, that had never been the problem — the discipline was entirely in the when, and in the whether, and most of all in the great refusing, the deliberate murder of nine possible things so that one might be lived rather than merely executed.
He learned to keep hours that did nothing. He had thought of idle time, all his working life, as the friction's leavings, the waste between deeds; he learned that it was the opposite, that the idle unpressured hour was not the gap between the life but the place where the life actually happened — that a man sitting by a window turning a brass wheel in the light, deciding nothing, making nothing, was not failing to live but living, more truly than Ferro in his week of doing everything had lived at all. He let the list swell. He stopped trying to close the gap between the done and the could-do; he understood at last that the gap was not a debt to be paid but the very breadth of a free life, and that the could-do was supposed to outrun the done, infinitely, always, and that a man who caught up to his own possibility would have nothing left of himself but the corridor with everyone walking through.
He kept the gift. He could not have given it back if he had wished to, and in time he no longer wished to, because the gift had taught him, by the cruelty of removing every distance, the worth of the distances he now put back by hand.
He set his own pace against the pace the thing pressed on him, and the setting of it was the discipline of the rest of his life — not a thing won once but a thing chosen each morning, the refusal to let the limitless ease decide his tempo, the daily hard art of doing far less than he could and leaving the enormous remainder to sit, unacted, half-formed, breathing, alive in the only way a possibility stays alive, which is unmade. He grew slow. He grew, his neighbours would have said had they thought about him at all, idle — a man who could clearly do a great deal and conspicuously did not, who left letters unbegun and tasks undone and whole splendid possible things lying about him untouched, who sat by his window of an afternoon turning some small ordinary object in the light, deciding whether it wanted to be finished, mostly deciding that it did not.
He visited Quist near the end of the old man's life, and found him doing nothing, with a brass wheel in his fingers, exactly as before, and the two of them sat a long while and made nothing and said almost nothing, and it was the fullest afternoon Ferro could remember. On the bench between them lay a hundred things that could be made and would not be, and neither man reached for any of them, and the not-reaching was not a poverty but the whole of the wealth, the only wealth the gift had finally yielded — that a man might hold the entire weightless possible in his open hand and choose, slowly, in his own time, against the relentless pace it offered him, to let the most of it alone; to keep his hand open; to let it breathe; and to do, of everything he could, only the few small things a life is actually made of, at the speed a life is actually lived, which is the speed of an old man by a window, turning one wheel in the failing light, in no hurry at all, having all the time there has ever been.