Andrew Santella - Soon: An Overdue History of Procrastination, from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me

For A-L

Lets shuck an obligation.

John Berryman,

Dream Song 82: Op. posth. no. 5

My father... proposed that I should become a clergyman. He was properly vehement against my turning an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination. I asked for some time to consider.

Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

Even a procrastinator has to start somewhereif hes going to start somewhereso lets start with Darwin.

Charles Darwin spent much of 1837 drawing, jotting, sketching, and scribbling in one of a series of pocket-size leather-bound notebooks he carried around London with him. Each notebook shut with a small metal clasp, like a diary.

He was living then in rented rooms in a house on Great Marlborough Street, not far from the Athenaeum Club, where rising literary and scientific men gathered to murmur great thoughts to one another amid neoclassical statuary. Darwin had just been elected to membership. One of his new clubmates would be Charles Dickens. I had guessed that the two must have met at some pointyou know: Dickens, Darwin, both named Charlesbut as far as I can tell, there is no record of it. I like to imagine them in conversation, bewailing the government or the food at the club.

Darwin was just twenty-eight then and had recently returned from a nearly five-year circumnavigation of the globe aboard the HMS Beagle, a trip that had made him a minor celebrity in scientific circles. Now he had a book contract and a growing reputation as a naturalist. As a bright and eligible bachelor, he was also getting more dinner invitations than he could accept. And he was still busy trying to make sense of what he had seen on his long voyage. Heres one mystery Darwin spent a lot of time puzzling out: On islands of the Galpagos archipelago, six hundred miles off the west coast of Ecuador, Darwin had found dozens of species of mockingbirdsone species for each island. Why so many varieties in one neighborhood, sharp-beaked birds in one place, blunt-beaked in another? And why had other naturalists found similar variations of iguanas and tortoises and other species, each islands populations different from the next?

These were just the kinds of questions Darwin had been jotting in his leather-bound notebooks, along with drawings and shorthand notes to himself and summaries of conversations with other naturalists. Now he was starting to sketch out some answers, too.

Each species changes, he wrote in one of his notebooks in the summer of 1838. Three words. Such a simple sentence, but a stunning one, too. Darwin had become convinced that the categories of creatures we know are not immutably fixed articulations of a divine plan, but the result of ongoing modification. By September, he had described in his notebooks the mechanism behind that changethe way an organisms environment favors certain random mutations and extinguishes others. He called this culling process natural selection.

This was world-changing, belief-shattering stuff. But twenty years would pass before the world would hear about it. Because Darwin, having made one of the great leaps of intellectual history, did something strange. He dropped the matter. He took no steps to publish his ideas. He sent no treatises to the scientific journals, wrote no essays for the popular press, didnt start writing a book or even seek out a publisher. Not yet, anyway. He did tell a few friends what he was thinking, and he did write a brief summary of his new theory, which he called a considerable step in science. But he kept this locked away, alongside his metal-clasped notebooks. With it, he placed instructions that his work be published only after his death.

It wasnt like Darwin was idle during this time. He married and started a family. He moved to a house in the country. He stayed back-achingly busy at his writing: He produced volumes on coral reefs and volcanic islands, and a five-part work called TheZoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. For a periodical called The Gardeners Chronicle, he wrote on some decidedly not world-changing topics: how to grow fruit trees from seedlings, for example, and the advantages of using wire rope for well buckets. And from 1846 to 1854, Darwin was almost obsessively engaged in dissecting and describing barnacles.

Darwin devoted whole years to barnacles. He became a barnacle enthusiast. Some might say he teetered on the brink of barnacle obsession. He hunched over a custom-made barnacle microscope all day, surrounded by specimens of barnacles pickled in alcohol, trying to understand the immense variety and mystery of barnacle-dom. He referred to them as my beloved barnacles. One of his friends said that Darwin had barnacles on the brain. Darwin spent so long studying barnacles that his children grew up thinking that all fathers lived like this. On a visit to a friends home, one of Darwins young kids is supposed to have asked, But where does your father do his barnacles?

The barnacles and other matters kept Darwin so busy that it wasnt until 1859 that he finally published The Origin of Species, the immensely consequential book that articulated the theory he had first sketched out in his notebooks more than twenty years earlier. Later, when he was old and eminent, Darwin himself confessed that he was puzzled by the delay between the formulation of his ideas and their publication in book form. Some have called this interval the long wait.

So why did Darwin wait so long to let the world know what he had figured out? Why did he put off sharing what he knew to be a monumentally significant scientific advance?

This is a question that preoccupies biographers, historians of science, and anyone interested in the odd ways otherwise rational peopleeven, as in Darwins case, fantastically brilliant and prolific onesbehave. A lot of explanations have been offered for Darwins delay. To begin, there was the very momentousness of his work. Darwin knew as well as anyone that his book would have a revolutionary impact on science and suspected that it would upend the quiet life he had made for himself in the country. It would be easy to understand ambivalence about such a prospect.

Darwin was also the product of a pious Christianity and, though he moved away from faith, he remained the husband of a believer (who worried about her husbands eternal soul) and the loyal son of a devout father. Darwin worried about upsetting the old man. Removing the hand of God from the process of species creation, as his book clearly did, would not have been a step to be taken lightly.

Then there was his perfectionism. Darwin, like any good scientist, was methodical and thoroughsee the rows of cabinets full of barnacles to be examined. In Darwins orderly mind, his decades-long delay would have seemed justified as the due diligence of a scientist who wanted to be sure he got the most important work of his life right. So there was always one more experiment to run, one more resource to check. And even when he did publish, he insisted on calling his epochal book an abstract, as if to apologize in advance should anyone find it incomplete.

Or is it that Darwin at first just didnt want to be bothered with publishing? In the parlor at Down House, his home fifteen miles outside London, there was a piano, and in the long hallway, cupboards to hold tennis rackets and hiking boots and notebooks and all the equipment to make British country life livable. There was a billiards room; there were gardens. My life goes on like clockwork and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it, he wrote to a friend, sounding like a man completely uninterested in upending his daily routine, let alone all of intellectual history. Clockwork was right. Every day started with a walk out into the countryside before first light; every lunch was preceded by a walk around the gardens with the family dog. In between, and maybe most important, there was work, the little researches he loved. There were barnacles.