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.

Jim Harrison has delivered similar advice, telling The Paris Review: “I usually dance a half-hour a day to Mexican reggae music with 15-pound dumbbells. I guess its aerobic, and the weights keep your arms and chest in shape.”

Lately I’ve been cavorting to the new Mekons album, appropriately titled “Horror,” in my living room. The trouble is that if you live in a New York City apartment, as I do, you worry about driving the downstairs neighbors to insurgency. Another problem is that you simply look ridiculous. My wife collapses with glee when she catches me. I look like I am fighting bees. Or like Khrushchev during one of his table-pounding tantrums.

Is running a better option? The Presidential Fitness Test, resuscitated by Donald Trump, suggests humans should be able to run a mile. I’d like to see him try.

My brother is the kind of super-athlete who, in his late 50s, guides blind runners in the Boston Marathon. (He also runs in Denver’s annual Taco Bell 50k, the rules of which stipulate stopping in many Taco Bells along the route and devouring Chalupa Supremes and other items.) The ability to run may lie dormant in my genes. I would like to see myself, once, in a T-shirt stained with salt lines.

These days, I run only when chased. My primary beef with running is that it’s boring. Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of Britain, wrote in The Spectator that one way to take your mind off the rigors of athletic exertion is to recite poetry. He’s said that he sometimes acts out “The Iliad” in different voices when he runs, terrifying passers-by.

Another Brit, Alexander Chancellor, wrote in his terrific memoir, “Some Time in America,” that he hated to see Bill Clinton, then the President, out running, “exposing his white thighs to the world.” I fear this would be my look as well. I would hate to add to the uglification of my favorite city.

One of the best paeans to jogging came from Don DeLillo, who sounded almost like Thoreau when he commented in an interview:

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours.

The writer Kiese Laymon, in his memoir “Heavy,” pointed out that it’s not easy to casually go running in America if you are Black, especially at night. You fear being shot by someone, maybe even the police.

Gentler indoor options abound; there are decent yoga and Pilates establishments, for example, near my apartment. But literature tends to teach that these activities make you less likable than you already are. A woman in Nunez’s “What Are You Going Through” observes that there is never “improvement in the moral character of any person she’d known who did yoga.” And Angela Carter said that it “improves one’s posture but not one’s tranquillity.”

Whenever I’ve attended a class, I’ve mentally agreed with Elif Batuman, who wrote in her novel “Either/Or” that “the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history.”

And gyms? Every time I debate signing up at Equinox, probably the best gym near me, I recall that the Austrian writer Robert Musil, the author of “The Man Without Qualities,” died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 62 after an exercise session. I am probably a more natural member of the organization Groucho Marx founded — the West Side Writing and Asthma Club.

Asked once how he got his exercise, the actor Robert Mitchum replied, “I run around and witness the intolerable follies of my times.” For years I’ve done this, in between popping the tabs on fridge cigarettes (Diet Cokes). It hasn’t done a damn thing for me.

Walking is what I’m best suited to, but I loathe it as well — too dull. But as my friend Will tells me, every time I inform him of my next mad exercise scheme, “If you’d only walk, you wouldn’t need to run.”