The Case for or Against Exercise: A Reader’s Quandary

Too few people realize, the choreographer Martha Graham wrote, “how the headlines that make daily history affect the muscles of the human body.” Perhaps you have been pummeled, like me, by the past decade’s headlines as if you were a veal cutlet. Perhaps you have responded, like me, by going into a tailspin of physical indolence. Like Oblomov, in Ivan Goncharov’s novel, I’ve often found it hard to get out of bed.

In my sloth, I’ve felt I had literature on my side. “How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?” Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in one of his “My Struggle” novels. “Caffeine was my exercise,” declared the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” In her 2020 novel, “What Are You Going Through,” Sigrid Nunez wrote that good diet and exercise will probably only make things worse in the end — when you long to finally die of a wasting disease but your body will not let you.

Writing is a sedentary trade. Perhaps Harold Pinter was right to suggest, in his play “Mountain Language,” that “intellectual arses wobble the best.”

Writers who work out have rarely seemed like my kind of people. Take Dan Brown, the author of “The Da Vinci Code.” He’s said he programs his computer to freeze for 60 seconds each hour so he can do push-ups and sit-ups. This sounds suspiciously close to the sort of advice Timothy Ferriss dispenses in his perennially best-selling “The 4-Hour Body,” and Ferriss weighs his own feces.

With fall on the horizon, and last season’s trousers to squeeze into, I’ve been thinking about finally shaking off my Decade of Lassitude and Lethargy and getting vaguely fit. Because I’ve turned to writers to justify my laziness, now I wonder: Can I turn to them for the inspiration to buff up my clerkly physique?

I’ve always liked James Boswell’s idea, in diaries published as “Boswell in Holland 1763-1764,” to take fresh air at your window in the morning and then “proceed to bodily exercise by dancing and capering about your room for near 25 minutes.” I picked up “Boswell in Holland” after learning that Julia Child’s husband used to read it to her while she was cooking. I like to imagine Julia capering in this manner.