❧ NOTE FROM THE EDITOR ❧
Welcome to the third letter.
We are now far enough along that this has become, technically, a habit. Three Fridays is not much, but it is enough to establish a rhythm, and rhythm is most of what a gazette is: the same shape arriving at the same hour, so that you know, without checking, that it is Friday and the letter has come. I am told that the most successful publications optimize their send times against engagement data. I send at two o'clock because that is when the light is best in the room where I write, which seems to me a sounder basis for a decision.
A great many of you are here this week because of one person's generosity. Kai Brach, who writes Dense Discovery, a letter I have admired for years and which is in many ways the reason I believed a publication like this could exist at all, read an essay of mine and gave it far more space and careful attention than I had any right to expect. A good number of you walked through that door. Welcome, I hope you stay, and I want you to know I feel the weight of how you arrived: when someone you respect vouches for you to his audience, the only honest response is to put your best foot forward every Friday thereafter, and I intend to.
Which brings me to a confession, and an apology to the readers who have been here since the first letter and must now watch me explain the furniture again. I am still finding the tone of this thing, the website is still rearranging itself, and you may notice the scaffolding up around the building for a few weeks yet: a byline appearing here, a structure shifting there. There is a paradox worth naming in that, because it sits at the heart of the whole enterprise: a gazette in praise of idleness is held together by a surprising amount of structure, the four fixed sections, the same hour, the same shape, the monthly figure. This is not a contradiction. Structure is the soundest defense against the wrong kind of idleness, the formless drift that produces nothing and enjoys nothing either, and the fixed form is precisely what frees the hour inside it. So bear with the visible joinery a little longer; once it comes down, what should remain is a steadier, more elegant thing, on the website and in the letter both.
This week the mystery deepens, and the second clue waits below, less oblique than the first. Last week I invited guesses, and the replies have been few and dignified, which I attribute to politeness rather than indifference. Let me lower the stakes: there are no wrong guesses, only early ones, and I answer every reply personally. The figure is not meant to be impossible. He is meant to be known by the people who would love him, and invisible to everyone else, which was more or less the condition of his entire existence.
A note before we begin, prompted by a kind letter from a reader. From this week the pieces on the website carry a name beneath the title. It was pointed out to me, correctly, that an unsigned essay makes little sense in a publication that intends, one day, to have more than one voice. So the byline arrives. The voice has not changed. It is only that I have stopped pretending the words assembled themselves.
Now then. To the letter.
❧ I. THE FRAGMENT ❧
Robert Walser spent the last decades of his life in a sanatorium, and was found dead in the snow on a Christmas Day walk in 1956, his hat fallen a little distance from his body, his footprints stopping where he stopped. He had told a visitor, years earlier, that he was not in the sanatorium to write, but to be mad. It is one of the saddest and most clarifying sentences I know, and I have never been entirely sure whether to read it as defeat or as a strange, hard-won peace.
In his final productive years he wrote hundreds of tiny texts in pencil, in a script so small that the editors who found them after his death first mistook the pages for a secret code, an invented private alphabet, the cipher of a disordered mind. They were not a code. They were ordinary German, simply written very, very small, in a hand reduced to almost nothing. He called this his "pencil method," and he described the relief of it, the way the pencil let him write slowly and quietly and without the performance that the pen, with its permanence and its confidence, seemed to demand of him. He was not hiding anything. He had simply stopped performing for anyone, and the writing shrank to the size of a man who no longer needed to be seen.
It took decades to transcribe them. Scholars worked from magnifying glasses and microfilm, deciphering a few words an hour. The man who wrote almost too small to be read is now read more carefully than writers who shouted.
— Robert Walser, from the Microscripts (c. 1924-1933)
Walser walked enormous distances, sometimes through entire nights, and wrote almost nothing down while walking. Then wrote it down later, very small. I think about the process inbetween the walking that produced the writing, the writing that tried to disappear, the snow at the end of it. He is not in the Pantheon this month, but he is a close cousin to the other figures. — L.U.
❧ II. THE PRACTICE ❧
Take a walk this week with no phone.
Not on silent. Not face down in your pocket, humming with restrained urgency. Left at home, on the table, in another room entirely, far enough away that retrieving it would require a decision. Then walk for at least thirty minutes with nothing in your hands and nothing in your ears and no way for anyone to reach you.
Notice the specific discomfort of the first minutes. It is a real discomfort, almost physical, the hand reaching for a thing that is not there, the small panic of being unreachable, the strange nakedness of walking through the world without a device mediating it. Do not fight the discomfort or judge yourself for it. It is the feeling of a muscle that has not been used in a long time, complaining about being used.
Then notice what happens after, once the reaching stops. Your attention, having nowhere to go but outward, goes outward. You begin to see the things Walser saw on his enormous walks: the particular way a wall meets the pavement, a face in a window, the light doing something it will not do again. You will not write any of it down. That is the point. You will simply have walked, and seen, and come home, with nothing to show for it and something you cannot quite name.
⌂ Estimated effort: thirty minutes and some willpower
☽ Estimated reward: disproportionate
❧ III. THE CLUE ❧
THE IDLE PANTHEON · No. I of XII
The first figure will be revealed at the end of this month.
Last week's clue was abstract: the shape of the man's philosophy, his private hierarchy with perplexity at its summit. This week the clue turns biographical, a little closer to the bone. Next week it will be concrete enough that anyone who has read the right book will set down their coffee and say his name aloud. On the final Friday of June, the portrait arrives.
Replies are still open, still read, still answered.
Clue 2 of 3:
"He wrote poems and threw them away the moment they were finished, because to keep them would have been to take them seriously, and to take them seriously would have been to betray them. He lived in a single city, haunting its cafes and its streets and the doorways of people who had learned to leave a place at the table for him, a thick and bent figure who arrived without warning and left without explanation, dispensing a wisdom that sounded, to the unprepared, exactly like nonsense.
He had studied. He could have been respectable; the respectable path had been open to him and he had looked at it and declined. The one thing he feared, the single force he treated as a genuine enemy, was the doctor who wanted to cure him of being himself, to file down the strangeness until what remained could hold a job and pay a rent and disappear into the productive crowd. He understood that this cure was the only real death available to a man like him, and he spent his life, brilliantly, avoiding it."
He was written by a Romanian. He has haunted a particular city ever since.
☞ Guesses welcome. Reply to this email. The final clue, and then the reveal, arrive over the next two Fridays.
❧ IV. THE POSTCARD ❧
Cluj-Napoca, half past twelve. Home at last, after a month spent moving: the cities of Moldova, then Bucharest in a hurry, then Cluj. There is a particular tiredness that comes from a good run of travel, and the only cure for it that I trust is a pot of rooibos at Demmers, the teahouse on the corner of the main square that I have decided, with no authority whatsoever, is the finest in the city. The tea arrives. The window is wide. The square moves past it.
The faces going by are mostly familiar, which is the strange gift of a small city you have lived in long enough. There are former colleagues, and acquaintances whose names I would have to reach for, and one or two I last spoke to at some party in the years when I was still young enough to throw away an entire night of sleep and feel nothing the next day. None of them see me, and I do not call out. We are, all of us, simply passing through the same square at slightly different speeds.
A woman stops to fix the strap of her bag, looks up at nothing in particular, and walks on. The tea is still too hot to drink. I am in no hurry to cool it.
— L.U.
❧ CLOSING NOTE ❧
Two practices in two weeks: one asked you to pick up a book you loved without your critical apparatus running, and this one asks you to put the phone down and walk. They are the same exercise in different postures. The gazette believes that attention is a single muscle, worked the same way whether you are reading or walking or sitting still: you remove the thing that summons your notice, and you wait, and your notice returns to you, and the world comes back into focus like a photograph developing.
Next Friday brings the third and final clue, the concrete one, and then on the last Friday of the month our first figure steps out of the shadows in full: a portrait, a field guide to his particular genius, and a print, for those who would like to keep him on a wall as a small daily argument against taking the respectable path.
Until then, the usual: do nothing if nothing appeals, forward this to good company if the mood takes you, and leave by the unsubscribe link with no hard feelings if the gazette is not for you. A letter about idleness should never become one more obligation in a life already full of them.
Until next Friday, at the hour of two.
Yours in idleness,
Leo Umilio
Editor, The Idle Gazette
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