Seventeen days: it's been that long since my last post, but I'm not quite sure where those seventeen days went. One of my favorite "edgy" novelists, the late Henry Miller, wrote that "When you forget to eat you know you're alive." I think he was trying to say that if you are so immersed in "authentic life projects" that food becomes secondary, or an afterthought, you are "living the good life." But right about now, I'd say "not so much."
When you're busy, life speeds up. A whole month can go by and you say, "Where in the hell did February go?" And I suppose that's better than twiddling your thumbs, looking at the clock, and hoping to make it through just one more hour or one more day of existence. (Some people who yearn for immortality hardly know what to do with themselves for an entire Saturday afternoon!) Still, the balance point between "activity" and "inactivity" in our culture is clearly not in the middle of such a continuum.
I'm haunted by passages such as this one in Miller's novel Plexus: "Finally it came about that I remained away from the office three days handrunning. It was just a sufficient break to make it impossible for me to return. Three glorious days and nights, doing exactly what I pleased, eating well, sleeping long, enjoying every minute of the day, feeling immeasurably rich inside, losing all ambition to battle with the world, itching to begin my own private life, confident of the future, done with the past, how could I go back into harness?
Hmm. I have a book in mind that I'd like to write. I'll call it "Civilization and its Discontents." (Catchy title, dontcha think?)
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