Welcome to Monday

Make no mistake: this man is doing nothing.

After a weekend of extreme feats of laziness, I came across this excerpt of a letter from Rilke to Rodin, by way of Geoff Dyer’s engrossing book, Our of Sheer Rage:

“I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction…”

Ah! So my idle time wasn’t wasted, but necessary to allow eventual brilliance to percolate. Thanks, Rilke!

6 Comments

1. November 29th, 2010 / 4:47 pm Steve Mitchelmore—

   “In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.”

   Emerson in “Experience”.

2. November 29th, 2010 / 8:18 pm Marian May Kaufman—

   What a comforting post.

3. November 29th, 2010 / 9:33 pm deadgod—

   I think the gist of what Rilke is saying is the reference to “those days on which we are forced to be indolent”.

   He’s not referring to sloth – which, maybe, he understands to be neither constructive nor virtuous – ; he’s referring to imprisonment, boundary, having been captured – by, say, illness, or bureaucratic inefficiency, or employment compulsorily empty of stimulation, or (osmotically) by a warm summer’s afternoon, or, of course, by ‘security’.

   He’s referring to special – intensified – cases of the imagination’s persistent restlessness in its cages of meat and office. He’s making, imaginatively, of those cages, enablements.

   Is this way of thinking really an affirmation?

4. November 29th, 2010 / 10:03 pm jereme_dean—

   i thought he was speaking about blue balls.

5. November 29th, 2010 / 10:50 pm deadgod—

   This “thought” is an example of projection, jereme.

6. November 29th, 2010 / 11:33 pm jereme_dean—

   My balls remain drained these days. Not a projection.