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the West Indies, Australia)—Trollope produced on average 3,000 words.
    Before beginning a project, he prepared a diary in which he calculated the number of weeks the book would require, then eachday he entered the number of pages written. With this system, he explained, “if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied.” Trollope was that admirable and rare phenomenon, an absolute professional. “In the bargain I have made with publishers ... I have prided myself on completing my work exactly within the proposed dimensions. But I have prided myself especially on completing it within the proposed time,— and I have always done so.”
    W. H. Auden said that a poet must keep hidden his passion for his shop, Evelyn Waugh that even revision and the correcting of publisher’s proofs must be done
con amove.
The flamboyant genius Colette adopted as her writing motto
“La règie guérit tout”—
discipline cures everything. Find the right work, these great artists remind us, the work you should be doing, and you will have largely solved the key question of how to spend your life.
    This doesn’t mean you will be happy all the time. But the work will become an inner citadel to which you can retreat during times of crisis, as well as a reliable rampart from which to face the world and misfortune. As the historian R. H. Tawney once wrote, “If a man has important work to do, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.” Yet almost any work can be important. With an admiration bordering on envy, the contemporary poet Philip Levine used to observe a clothes presser in a Detroit tailor’s shop: “I read in his movements not a disregard for this work but, rather, the affirmation that all workwas worth doing with elegance and precision and that necessary work granted dignity to the worker. For me he was both a pants presser and the most truly dignified person I’d ever met, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
    Levine’s words call to mind the classical imperative: “Do what you are doing.” That is, whether you are preparing dinner or playing tennis or tuning a car’s engine or sweeping a room, really focus your whole self on just that. Do it well, and you can invest even the most trivial activities with significance, transforming the mundane into the spiritual.
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
    The best book ever written about the relationship between work and leisure remains
Walden
, by Henry David Thoreau. (If you’ve never read it, read it now.) Its opening chapters and its conclusion, in particular, remind us that what matters in life is to become who we are, and that the only failure is to shrink from this duty and follow instead the dictates of family, society, or religion.
    Thoreau writes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, so that when I came to die I would not discover that I had not lived.” That last clause indicates the cost of refusing to acknowledge what one is. Too many people, Thoreau was convinced, allow their lives to be used up in the pursuit of needless wealth and social status; hence his advocacy of simplicity and his advice to keep wants to a minimum. Throughout
Walden
Thoreau persistently asks us to thinkabout a single question: What really matters? Our answer determines how we live, how well we spend those days and nights given to each of us alone. As he reminds us in a famous sentence: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to that music which he hears, no matter how measured or far