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  I don’t have to jump at every bit of clickbait I encounter to know how completely the language of business management now defines self-improvement. The ideal promoted in airport bookstalls and viral videos involves a more productive, more punctual me. It stigmatizes any variation toward the individual and idiosyncratic.

  I remember trying to explain to Ferrari why the merging of popular self-improvement with managerial imperatives left me skeptical. Wouldn’t anyone who aspired to independent thought feel obliged to resist the constant exhorting to be faster, better, and a more model drone?

  “Yeah, that’s what we call being reactant,” Ferrari told me. “That’s when you say, ‘If you tell me to do this, well then, I’m gonna do just the opposite.’”

  “But some of the most fun I’ve had in my life has been doing the things I wasn’t supposed to be doing,” I countered. Ferrari looked a little alarmed, but I went on. “I just mean making my own choices. Don’t you think that deferring or declining or postponing can be an active choice, a way of constructing yourself?”

  No, he didn’t think so.

  “Look, there are real costs to procrastination,” Ferrari said. “There are economic costs, yes, but the personal costs are huge. In relationships. In self-worth. Life is short. Have you made a difference in the world?”

  I wasn’t prepared to stake my argument on the thin evidence of my personal contributions to the universal good. So I said nothing. But later I thought of something that every procrastinator knows: sometimes the best things you do are the things you do only to put off doing something else.

  I’m not sure how social-science researchers would quantify a paradox like that. I want to understand myself as an individual, not as science and social science would understand me, as an example of a general type. My procrastination is to me subtle and subjective and mysterious and unknowable. But then, I would think so. I am a procrastinator, which means I know how to rationalize my habit.

  Jones and Berglas seemed to be getting at something like this point when they wrote that all of us have a “need for certain kinds of ambiguity to allow room for self-sustaining and self-embellishing fantasies.”

  Freud recognized that patients wanted it both ways: having come to the doctor seeking help, they would do their best to keep the doctor from helping them at all. Procrastination has always been a favorite tactic for analysands hoping to obstruct their own analysis. Knowing you have fifty minutes of the doctor’s time, you spend almost all of it talking about inconsequential stuff. Only at the very last minute, if at all, do you bring up what you really want to discuss. When you consider the vulnerability of the analysand’s position—lying down maybe, being operated on in a sense—stall tactics are understandable. Hold on. I’m not quite ready for this.

  But the analyst can delay, too. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, wanting to control the pace of treatment, introduced his notorious “short sessions,” in which the analyst abruptly interrupts the unsuspecting patient and dismisses her. How short were Lacan’s short sessions? That was up to Lacan. In his book, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero, Stuart Schneiderman, a former analysand, recounted how Lacan ended one session by rising from his chair and announcing that the two were finished for the day. Schneiderman had just begun talking.

  The end of a Lacanian session had meaning, at least for Lacan. He wanted his analysands to wonder: What did I say to make my doctor cut me off so soon? The question would dangle in the interval between sessions, ripening for discussion by the next meeting.

  So too would other questions, such as Do I still have to pay for an hour of analysis, if I get only five minutes? For the record, Lacan didn’t seem too concerned about the money questions. Schneiderman recalls him sitting at his desk, counting bank notes during sessions.

  Preoccupied as I was becoming with procrastination, I wondered if Lacan had located a previously underappreciated power in postponement. Where his analytical colleagues had allowed their fearful, unready analysands to waste their time, Lacan adopted delay as a therapeutic strategy. By abruptly ending the session, in effect postponing the session, he had made the session more potent.

  I took that as further evidence of a truth I had begun to recognize: no matter how much you deplore procrastination in others, you can always find a good reason to do it yourself.

  3

  Saints, Crows, Poets, Priests

  We will labor now. Alas, it is too late.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”

  On a road in fourth-century Armenia, the story goes, a Roman centurion met a talking crow. The officer had resolved to convert to Christianity, but now this eloquent crow had come to urge him not to do anything rash. The crow had an idea for the centurion: Delay the conversion; don’t rush. Maybe take a day to think about it.

  The centurion, though, would not be put off. He insisted on starting his new life as a believer immediately.

  Realizing that the crow was, in fact, the Devil in avian form arrived to tempt him, the centurion—who would later be venerated as St. Expedite, patron saint of procrastinators—did something remarkable. He stomped the talking bird to death.

  I learned about St. Expedite early in my research. I was raised Catholic and educated in Catholic schools and had read countless lives of countless saints, but I had no idea there was a patron saint of procrastinators. It made a kind of sense, though. Any guilt-plagued procrastinator knows what it is to worry about the cost of delay. Will I miss the deadline that I ignored too long? Will I fail the exam for which I prepared too late? In St. Expedite’s story the stakes were raised, the price of procrastination inflated. For Expedite, delay meant risking his very soul. The story of St. Expedite and the talking crow made procrastination a matter of spiritual life and death.

  The more I thought about the saint and his talking crow, the more I appreciated the mythic gravitas his legend brought to my commonplace habit. Expedite made me feel ennobled. Procrastination as understood in the context of St. Expedite stood in for the most basic conflicts between the temporal and the eternal, the rapacious body and the imperiled soul. This seemed like a promising thread for the self-justifying procrastinator to pursue.

  I soon found out that the Saint Who Refused to Delay is the object of a devotional cult that spans several continents. On tiny Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, believers build roadside altars in Expedite’s honor, always painted bright red and decorated with small statues of the saint. They are part of an elaborate protocol of intercessory prayer and bargaining. The way it works is this: You pay homage to the saint by constructing a roadside altar complete with a figurine of Expedite, then ask for his help in getting what you want. If, despite your homage to Expedite, your prayers go unanswered, the local tradition is to decapitate the figurine. This explains why headless statues of St. Expedite are so easy to find on Réunion Island.

  In São Paulo, Brazil, the system is slightly different. Worshippers crowd services on St. Expedite’s feast day to leave scribbled prayers at church altars imploring the saint’s help. (The Feast of St. Expedite is celebrated on April 19, just a few days after another key date for American procrastinators—tax-filing day in the United States.)

  The locus of devotion to St. Expedite in the United States is in Louisiana, where his cult draws on a syncretic mingling of Catholic and voodoo influences. Nowhere does it thrive more fully than in New Orleans. The irony of this is too obvious to make a big deal about: somehow you have to go to America’s capital of revelry and good times rolling to understand how punctuality can be the basis of a kind of faith.

  In New Orleans, it’s not hard to find prayer cards printed with ready-made invocations to the erstwhile centurion:

  Saint Expedite,

  Noble Roman youth, martyr,

  You who quickly bring things to pass,

  You who never delays, I come to you in need . . .

  Or

  St. Expedite, witness of Faith to the point of martyrdom, in exe
rcise of Good, you make tomorrow today.

  You live in the fast time of the last minute, always projecting yourself toward the future.

  Expedite and give strength to the heart of the man who doesn’t look back and who doesn’t postpone.

  The most impressive thing about St. Expedite may be that he inspires all this devotion having never, most likely, really existed. Catholic authorities concede that St. Expedite is an assemblage of myths and legends, with little basis in fact. Nevertheless, the early church deployed St. Expedite as the focus of a kind of fourth-century marketing campaign to broadcast its antiprocrastination creed. His image was supposed to persuade pagans of the need not to put off their salvation, to convert promptly, before it became too late.

  * * *

  Today, one of the best-known statues of St. Expedite lives in a small church on the scruffy edge of New Orleans’s French Quarter, where the scent of spilled beer hangs heavy on the streets. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church is the city’s oldest, built in 1826 as a funeral chapel. Its statue of St. Expedite occupies a small niche in the back of the church, and when I flew to New Orleans to visit the saint, I found about a dozen intercessory prayers written on bits of paper and left at the base of the statue. They had been dropped there by visitors who had come to the church to ask for Expedite’s help in some urgent matter or other—beating their drinking habit or escaping some legal difficulty or, of course, overcoming their tendency to procrastinate.

  I had been told that it was local custom for the devout to leave a pound cake by the statue as an offering to the saint. But that day I found no pound cake among the scribbled prayers. There in the spooky old church, surrounded by flickering candles, I briefly wondered if all the proffered cakes had been accepted and consumed by St. Expedite through some miracle.

  It turns out that there is a less supernatural explanation. The job of removing pound cake and other offerings from the foot of the statue belongs to Father Anthony Rigoli, the church’s pastor, known locally as Father Tony. Cleaning up after petitioners appears nowhere on Father Tony’s official job description, but I guess one does what has to be done. He is a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, an organization of priests dedicated to preaching to the poor. As pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he has inherited by default all the responsibilities that come with managing the best-known St. Expedite shrine in North America.

  I had made arrangements to talk with him one afternoon in the week before Mardi Gras. Making the short walk from my hotel to the church, early in the afternoon, I had the chance to watch overserved tourists stagger down the sidewalks, which is a kind of New Orleans spectator sport. The run up to the annual pre-Lenten climax of revelry had begun. The city’s immoderation seemed magnified.

  In the middle of all this humid partying, the modest church on Rampart Street was a cool refuge. I had arranged to meet Father Tony in the small gift shop next door to the church, where visitors can browse through prayer books, saints’ medals, and prayer cards—kind of a Barnes & Noble for the pious. While I was waiting, I picked up a small pewter St. Expedite medal and a devotional card with a ready-made prayer to the saint: “. . . that we may, by the intercession of St. Expedite, be conducted with courage, fidelity, and promptitude, at the time proper and favourable and come to a good and happy end, through our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

  Before he came to Our Lady of Guadalupe fourteen years ago, Father Tony had not heard of St. Expedite. But once at work at the church, he quickly grew accustomed to the tour buses cruising by on Rampart Street, telling their version of the Expedite story: one day in the nineteenth century, a package arrived at the New Orleans church containing a statue of an unknown saint. Since the package bore only the postal instruction “expedite,” the mystery saint was soon given that name himself. It is a story for which the pastor has little use.

  Neat and gray-haired and energetic, Father Tony was wearing a New Orleans Saints sweatshirt over his clerical collar when he found me wandering the gift shop and introduced himself. Cheering for the Saints (the football team, not the holy people) had been one of Father Tony’s concessions to the local culture, and not one he made easily, having grown up a Bills fan in Buffalo. In New Orleans’s distinctive brew of cultures and faiths, it helps to maintain a certain flexibility for crossovers and hybridization. Some of St. Expedite’s most devoted followers in New Orleans aren’t Catholics at all, but practitioners of voodoo. They sometimes come into the gift shop at Our Lady of Guadalupe seeking black candles for their rites.

  I asked Father Tony if he believed leaving pound cakes for St. Expedite was an effective strategy for getting what one wanted. He rolled his eyes toward heaven.

  “People get confused about these devotions, because they can border on superstitions,” he said. He tried to clarify. “I don’t think saints answer prayers, but I do think Jesus does. When we ask someone to pray for us, what we’re really asking for is support. We all want to feel that support. So these devotions are really for our sake. And that’s okay. But I think the Lord has bigger things to worry about.”

  * * *

  The Catholic world in which I was raised had little use for tardiness. In my Catholic grade school, brilliance was tolerated, but punctuality revered. Nothing was more important than being on time. Every once in a while you would run across some nun who was so fanatical about punctuality that she insisted all her students be in their homeroom seats five minutes before the school day was to start. This was the sort of hyperpunctuality that turned actual punctuality into tardiness. We thought of it as nun time.

  The clock was our enemy in those days. It seemed determined to frustrate us. The classroom clock was almost always positioned, not coincidentally, just below the crucifix that watched over us. In the most tedious classes, when we longed most desperately for release, the minute hands always seemed to stall. When we needed more time, say to complete a test or finish an in-class essay, the clock betrayed us by seeming to gain pace. I know you don’t have to be a Catholic schoolkid to feel betrayed by the clock; school days can seem interminable anywhere. But enduring as much talk of eternity as we did left us, I think, especially worried that three o’clock might never come.

  Father Tony told me that not long before my visit, he had preached about a reading from the Gospel of Mark: the story about Jesus encountering the sibling fishermen Simon and Andrew along the Sea of Galilee. Jesus had invited them to abandon their livelihoods and to join him in his itinerant ministry. The brothers did not delay. “Immediately they left their nets and followed Him,” says the Gospel.

  “It says immediately,” Father Tony went on. “They dropped what they were doing that instant to follow Jesus. Think about what they were being asked to do. They were supposed to give up their livelihoods, everything they knew. And yet there was no hesitation.”

  Few of us measure up to such a model of dispatch. Father Tony confessed to me that back when he was teaching high school students, he tended to put off grading his students’ papers. I told him that I thought this was the kind of bad habit that could be justified, considering that many of the students had probably themselves waited until the last minute to do their work.

  It was at this point that I decided I might as well unburden myself of a secret, to make my own confession to Father Tony. So I came clean: I told Father Tony I had put off having this very conversation. The shameful truth was that I had made an earlier, unproductive reportorial trip to New Orleans—unproductive because of my habitual procrastination.

  What had happened was this: When I had first learned about the St. Expedite statue at Our Lady of Guadalupe, I had come down to New Orleans from Brooklyn, with my buddy Mike, a friend since high school. Mike is a writer, too, but unlike me, he’s no procrastinator. Mike had inspired my visit to New Orleans. Over dinner one night, he’d told me about his plans for a new book, a book that would require him to travel to Israel to do research. I praised Mike’s idea for the book, encouraged him to go to Israel, and fig
ured nothing would come of it. A few days later, Mike e-mailed me from Israel.

  I was amazed. He might as well have e-mailed from the moon. There was no circumstance under which I could imagine deciding to go halfway around the world on short notice to pursue some germ of an idea that had just come to me.

  I have always envied travelers like Mike, and the ease with which they pick themselves up and get around the world. I envy their e-mails that casually mention, “I’m in Amsterdam.” I envy their ability to beg out of a lunch date by saying, “Sorry, I’ll be in Bangkok that day.” Because I am a procrastinator, travel doesn’t come easily to me and it is one of the things I most frequently put off until some future date, a date that often never comes. It would be only fair if travel procrastinators like me could collect some official tag or stamp or ticket, something like those old steamer-trunk stickers, but in our case representing each of the places we have not gone. I have not gone to Paris or Rome or Tokyo. Last fall, I didn’t go to Princeton, New Jersey.

  It was Mike who convinced me that I had to go to New Orleans for my book. And knowing how likely I was to put off such a trip, he insisted on going with me. So it was that a few weeks later, Mike and I found ourselves in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in New Orleans, staring at the statue of St. Expedite. My vague plan had been to talk to some of the locals—a priest, a parishioner, anyone I spotted leaving a piece of pound cake for St. Expedite—as part of my journey into the history of procrastination.

  But once in New Orleans, I found I didn’t really want to talk to anybody. I had what seemed like better things to do. Mostly those things involved eating and drinking. An entire city of Sazeracs and po’boys beckoned, and I felt it would be rude not to answer. And so it was that, a day and a half later, and despite Mike’s evident mystification, we left New Orleans without having spoken with anyone about St. Expedite.