❧ NOTE FROM THE EDITOR ❧
Welcome to the eleventh letter, and to August.
The continent is now fully horizontal. The cities have been handed over to tourists and pigeons, the official languages are sunscreen and ice cream, and every institution that can close has closed, leaving notes of varying honesty. August is the one month when doing nothing enjoys broad legal protection, and the gazette regards it the way a fisherman regards the sea: with professional respect, and a slight wariness about the amateurs.
Because August idleness, the sanctioned kind, the booked-in-February kind, is mostly rest, and you have heard this gazette on the difference. The beach week earns its keep; it restores; it has a return on investment, and there is nothing wrong with it except everything that is missing from it. Our subject this month is the other thing, and the figure whose clues begin below is its purest case in all of literature: a man who is never on vacation because he is never employed in any way that sticks, who moves constantly and arrives nowhere, who does not surf the current of his life so much as float in it, face up, mildly surprised. The strangest saint of our twelve, as promised: the patron of drift.
Two dispatches went up on the site meanwhile: The Skipped Stone, on the oldest pointless physics there is, and Who Is Last?, on the four words that turn a Romanian queue into a parliament. Both are about motion that produces nothing, which turns out to be this month's subject. On the next newsletter will introduce our first guest essay
Now then. To the letter.
❧ I. THE FRAGMENT ❧
In Walker Percy's novel, a young New Orleans stockbroker has a secret, and the secret is that he is awake. Everyone around him is sunk in what he calls the everydayness, the comfortable sleep of routine, the condition of being so thoroughly settled into one's life that one no longer notices being alive at all. His rebellion is almost invisible. He goes to the movies. He drives his car around the suburbs. He notices things: the quality of light on a particular street, the way a stranger holds a newspaper, the small electric strangeness leaking out of ordinary afternoons. He calls his discipline the search, and he defines it with the precision of a man who has thought about nothing else: the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. By every external measure he is doing nothing. Internally he is the only person he knows who is fully switched on. - on Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)
❧ II. THE PRACTICE ❧
This week, take a journey with no destination. Get on a bus, a tram, or a train going somewhere you have never been, ride it until something out the window catches your eye, get off there, and find your way back at your leisure.
The instruction sounds passive and is the opposite. Drifting, done honestly, requires more attention than arriving, because arrival lets you sleep through the journey and drift forbids it: with no destination, the window is all there is, and you have to actually look out of it, judging each stop on its merits, reading the streets for the one that is quietly asking for you. Most travel is a corridor between two appointments. This is travel as the moviegoer practiced it, travel as pure search: motion whose entire cargo is your own attention. You will get off somewhere. You will not know why. Walk it anyway. The afternoon will hand you something, a street, a shopfront, a conversation, an apricot tree leaning over a fence, that no itinerary could have booked, because the things worth finding keep no calendar and answer no reservations.
⌂ Estimated effort: one afternoon and one ticket
☽ Estimated reward: disproportionate
❧ III. THE CLUE ❧
THE IDLE PANTHEON · No. III of XII
The third figure will be revealed at the end of this month.
Clue 1 of 3, the shape of the philosophy, such as it is:
He does not act. He is acted upon. He moves up and down the same stretch of coastline like an object on a string, flung out and reeled back by forces he neither controls nor particularly resents, taking jobs and losing them with exactly equal indifference. Objects conspire against him, and he knows it: things break in his hands, machines sense his approach, the inanimate world has filed its complaint. He calls himself, with some accuracy and no self-pity, a human failure, and seems at peace with the designation, which is precisely what makes the designation wrong.
☞ Guesses welcome, and rewarded: reply with any name and a postcard of Haňťa comes back to you by post, handwritten, right answers and wrong ones exactly alike. The early reckless guesses remain my favorite kind.
❧ IV. THE POSTCARD ❧
Cluj-Napoca, nine in the morning, the big market at Mihai Viteazul. August has arrived in its official form, which is a mountain of watermelons the size of a small fortification, presided over by a vendor with the gravity of a customs officer. The buying of a watermelon here is not a transaction but an examination, and the examination has one instrument: the knock. Knuckles against the rind, head tilted, the whole market percussion section at work, everyone listening for the correct hollowness, which cannot be described, only inherited.
A woman ahead of me rejects three melons on acoustic grounds. The vendor takes no offense; he selects a fourth himself, knocks it once, and presents the sound as evidence. She listens. The jury returns. Sold.
I knock mine in turn, hearing, as always, absolutely nothing diagnostic, and buy it on faith, which is how I buy most things. The vendor nods as if I had passed anyway. The melon rides home in the crook of my arm like a planet being relocated, and the morning smells of peaches, diesel, and the river. - Leo Umilio
Next Friday, the second clue, and the gazette's first guest essay: a former hospital chaplain on the idleness nobody chooses. More when it arrives.
Now do nothing if nothing appeals, pass this on if the mood takes you, and leave with no hard feelings if it is not for you.
Until next Friday, at the hour of two.
Yours in idleness,
Leo Umilio Editor,
The Idle Gazette
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