More specifically concerning: laziness
09.03.02 – Saturday
9 March 2002, around 21.19.
10 a.m. – overcast – damp concrete and asphalt – buildings and cars reduced to slick darkness. The taste of old coffee settles, permanent, in my mouth, ashen, dull. I woke up late and my only desire was to read about history – Chinese history, architectural history: history. Anyway. Then, after noon. Appeareth the sun, […]
12.03.02 – Tuesday
12 March 2002, around 21.20.
Searching. The heaviness behind the eyes – which at present comes of wanting to read. Waiting. I would like tomorrow to be done with, complete, perfected. That seems to me the most horrible thing a person could wish – the negation of possibilities. Aimless drifting. The steadfast refusal of the orders to resolve. Crumbling. Tottering. […]
3.04.02 – Wednesday
3 April 2002, around 13.50.
Sweltering. Not that it’s warm or anything – just my poor brain tottering under the weight of the semester’s coming end. Even so. How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!
N°. 7
23 July 2002, around 17.00.
Finally it became a matter of principle, this standing about doing nothing. I watched and waited and wondered when the flies would land, when the process of decay would become incontrovertible. The inexplicability of it almost startled me; but it was, I think, beautiful.
of Vices and Virtues
1 April 2003, around 18.03.
Library, sunlight, nine a.m. Our breach of hospitality went to my conscience a little: but I quickly silenced that monitor by two or three specious reasons, which served to satisfy and reconcile me to myself. The pain which conscience gives the man who has already done wrong, is soon got over. Conscience is a coward, […]
Citation (10)
12 July 2003, around 8.05.
a glimpse in the mirror.
a quiver
15 September 2004, around 9.51.
Curvet.
fog
13 October 2006, around 11.26.
The trouble with epigraphy. A fog has settled in for the winter and, although the café is warm and bright, the bustle and noise merely accentuate the drizzle and dark outside. It is my favorite time of year. It feels right to be inside, to be making things with my hands and reading books. Not […]
a pounding
28 July 2007, around 1.22.
https://www.eudaemonist.com/images/168.jpg
turn about
6 September 2007, around 10.12.
The process of not writing has been a kind of sleep – fitful dormancy. I cannot tell if I am awake again – awake to the habit of writing, of typing, of setting my thoughts someplace other than the impermanent stream of the passing breath – cannot tell if this is not just another middle-of-the-night […]
mulch
24 December 2013, around 14.10.
No snow, sadly. And of course expected – hoped for – snow at the mountain for Christmas; I’m sure there is, too, another few hundred feet further up. The only thing for it is to skate Skarphedin-like across the hardwood floors in stocking’d feet for another cup of tea.
undetectable
12 January 2014, around 15.11.
A down-graded storm. There are of course other things I should be doing, even other things I should be reading, but just at the moment detective stories seem to be what I want. They are amusing and plotty and charmingly shamefaced. There’s not a one that takes itself too seriously, not one that claims it […]
barrier to entry
31 August 2014, around 14.48.
Reading at the window, December 2013. There were too many things to do this summer, each day crowded with too of the little nothings that are so necessary if anything is going to happen. Now, though, projects are winding down, and there’s nothing to do but bustle about and procrastinate on those last few things […]
a ramble
6 September 2015, around 8.38.
Now Reader, don’t go making trouble fixing names to all this. I say thereଁs not a person nor a thing in this book that ever stepped outside of this book. It’s all out of my head. And don’t go looking like a sick cat for wicked envy, it’s a thing you might come to yourself: […]
pragmatism
7 February 2016, around 10.11.
There are imperfections. A part of me would like to say that I have made a thing that is as perfect as possible, that the work’s flaws are entirely due to lack of technique or poor materials, but that is not the case: I have been lazy. I have made errors and, though I have […]
bettered novels (22.1)
13 February 2016, around 13.22.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, part 1, first impressions (1796/1813).
transparent
15 May 2019, around 1.11.
The thing about The Fifth Child is that, for so slight a book, it does not seem to be quite sure what it wants to achieve. The first half or two-thirds focus on the parents of the eponymous child and the decisions they make to further their rather banal vision of the ideal life. The […]
16.ii.2021
16 February 2021, around 11.50.
‘Think in moderation. Remain on your bed. Contemplate on the wall the daylight vanishing, and the balance of light and shadow pursuing one another insensibly towards the night. Simple time is a great remedy.’ —Paul Valéry, Dialogues (trans. W.M. Stewart)
the hazy reader
24 February 2024, around 17.35.
These little puzzles which, without exception, have an artistic purpose, should also be fun. The approximate reader, drowsy from the airliner’s unhealthy air and the complimentary drinks he has downed, always has the lamentable option of skipping, as he often did with the best-selling Lolita. —Dmitri Nabokov (‘On a book entitled The Enchanter’)
unsettlement
25 February 2024, around 16.54.
It is the uneasy time of year, when the weather is strange; one wakes up already tired to face the prospect of dragging oneself through the day. One looks at one’s stacks of books or tasks with hope for the morrow, but each day when it arrives carries plans away in an unwholesome deluge of […]