Small movies sometimes leave big impacts. Such a small movie was the 2002 Hugh Grant / Toni Collette movie, About a Boy. It was written by Nick Hornby, who wrote several other impactful small movies like Wild with Reese Witherspoon, Brooklyn with Saoirse Ronan and An Education with Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard. I really appreciate well-written scripts and compelling stories rather than all the big, bold action we tend to see mostly in the popular cinema these days. The characters in these well-crafted slices of life are often the best parts, as is the case with most good writing. The Hugh Grant character is rather unique in a world of alpha dogs where achievement motivation is the dominant human trait for a character that we highlight and care about. Those characters may approach their can-do attitudes differently, but they are still most often doers. There are only a few great passive characters in literature that take center stage like Walter Mitty.
Passive protagonists present a fascinating paradox in storytelling. While conventional wisdom suggests that compelling main characters should drive the action, some of literature and film’s most memorable figures are defined by their inaction, observation, or resistance to change. These characters often serve as vehicles for profound commentary on society, human nature, and the nature of free will. Strangely enough, they can be hard for us to fully comprehend since we are, ourselves mostly prone to action rather than inaction. Perhaps literature’s ultimate passive character is Herman Melville’s chronicler, Bartleby’s, from Herman Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” Bartleby is a law copyist (or scrivener) who’s hired by the story’s narrator, a Manhattan lawyer. At first, Bartleby is a skilled and tireless worker. However, one day when asked to proofread a document, he simply responds with what becomes his famous phrase: “I would prefer not to.” From there, he begins using this phrase to decline increasingly basic work tasks, then life tasks in general. What makes Bartleby such a fascinating passive character is both the gentle politeness and the absolute immovability of his refusal. He doesn’t aggressively rebel – he merely “prefers not to” participate. This can be read as a critique of Wall Street and capitalism, an existential statement about free will and passive resistance, a psychological study of depression and disconnection, and even a meditation on how society handles those who simply refuse to participate in its systems. What makes him particularly powerful as a passive character is that his inaction actually drives all the story’s action – everything revolves around how others react to his simple, polite refusal to engage.
The Hugh Grant character is the son of a regular man who happened to write a popular Christmas tune that gets replayed year-after-year and generates a generous royalty flow of income to Grant such that he has never had to work, nor does he aspire to do much of anything, including engage in lasting relationships. Unlike Miles (Paul Giamatti) in the movie Sideways (another great “passive” character), Grant is not so pitiful in his inability to achieve those things he wants so badly (Miles wants a good marriage and a successful career), but is rather somewhat enviable in a carefree way. His dynamic tension is that he doesn’t want them, he prefers superficiality and detachment. In some ways, while we feel sorry for Miles, we don’t know what to feel about Grant.
One of the most notable aspects to life as Grant is his treatment of time. He actually narrates a wonderful segment about how the detached and uninvolved person who has an easy and unproductive life gets through it all. It is the perfect analogy for retirement with the exception that Grant did nothing but be born to achieve this exalted passive status where the typical retired person presumably worked hard his or her whole life to achieve this respite from activity. Where Grant never had to achieve his status, the retiree proabably spent years working towards that very goal. Nevertheless, they both find themselves in the exact same predicament and it is unclear that based on the amount of luck and randomness that our societal success entails, that Grant’s position is any less well earned than the retiree’s. What they both must do at this point in life is decide how they will use their time, the resource that we all realize sooner or later is the most precious and universally so for us all. It is just not sufficient to do what Grant does and break up the day into manageable units of time and then figure out ways to put those units to work doing mundane tasks or spending them in casual leisure. That gives no trajectory to life, but maybe that’s the point that people like me have such a hard time understanding. I need a place to be going and a purpose where others are happy just wandering. To deploy Kim’s favorite lexicological confusion, some people are happy to spend their time wandering while I tend to overspend my time wondering.
I recently pondered a significant outcome from all these wildfires and all the challenges in arranging and maintaining homeowner’s insurance. When I laid this out to one person, their reaction was that they were not about to waste their time wondering about the problem because worrying without a purpose struck them as one of the least productive ways to spend their life. While I wouldn’t characterize myself as a worrier (by the way, note to self…the worrier/warrior interplay might be worth contemplating), I am most definitely a wonderer. In many ways, these blog stories are little more than my random wondering put into some semblance of stories that have a start, a middle and hopefully a cohesive end.
I find myself thinking about the time use patterns of people I know who are similarly retired. Kim is certainly my closest subject of observation and there is a comparability in her engagement with singing and performing and my engagement with work and writing. Hey are each important activities for us to use as the focus of our time and around which we pack in more or less other activity as the schedule of the moment allows. This all comes to mind today, because as most of us encounter, but most of us try to either ignore or rationalize away, this is a day with little or no scheduled activity. He weather is pleasant so there is no excuse not to go out. There is no work on my docket as what needed to be done I did yesterday in several hours and now I just have to wait for one of my plates to stop spinning to give me something more to do. I have one errand for less than an hour and then I will need to find something to do with the day. I won’t have this problem tomorrow, because I both have some specific work to do and we have our friends Gary & Oswaldo coming over to spend the weekend with us. So, I guess I will do like Hugh Grant and split the day up into time units and figure out how to evenly distribute them over several activities so I feel that I have done something with my day.