❧ NOTE FROM THE EDITOR ❧
Welcome to the sixth letter, and to July.
June is in the archive now, and it leaves something behind: the first figure has been revealed, sealed, and given a permanent room of his own, which you can visit. An important first step, and an instructive one. The reveal estranged some of you, left some unimpressed, and delighted the rest, which is exactly what a strong debut should do; a figure who provokes only one reaction would not have been worth any effort. Thank you for the way you carried the first mystery: patience, reckless guesses, and at least one reply that made me laugh out loud at my own desk, which remains the highest honor this publication can receive.
June also went out melting, and July shows every sign of continuing the argument. I recommend surrender. Darkened rooms, shutters drawn against the white part of the day, a book if the mind will hold one, and if it will not, the older discipline of lying still and letting the thoughts soften along with everything else. There is nothing wrong in being defeated by a season; it is one of the few defeats that asks nothing further of you. It is also, conveniently, the right weather for a new puzzle: the first clue of the second figure waits below, and you are invited to build a whole man out of it, precisely because you cannot yet know who he is.
July brings a small calendrical luxury that I want to announce up front. This month has five Fridays, and the gazette has decided what to do with the spare. The second figure's clues run for three weeks, beginning below; the portrait arrives on the fourth Friday, the twenty-fourth; and the fifth Friday, the last day of July, will be an interlude, a letter in which nothing advances, no clue, no reveal, no commerce, nothing but the usual furniture and a little more room to sit in it. Other publications use surplus weeks to catch up. We will use ours to fall deliberately behind.
Of the new figure I will say only what the last letter promised: he is a great friend of paper. How great a friend, and at what cost, the clues will tell. He is gentler than Lichter, quieter, and he has spent thirty-five years in a place most people would call the bottom, without once considering it anything but the center of the world.
Now then. To the letter.
❧ I. THE FRAGMENT ❧
The most famous insurance official in history worked in Prague, at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, where by all accounts he was good at his job: diligent, well liked, twice promoted, the author of admired reports on wood-planing machines and the prevention of severed fingers. His office day ended at two in the afternoon. He went home, slept into the evening, rose, and then, in the hours when the building and the city and the century were finally quiet, he wrote, sometimes until three in the morning, the strangest and most exact sentences of his age. He complained about the arrangement constantly, in letters and diaries, with the special eloquence of a man who has no intention of changing it. The office, he insisted, was devouring him; the writing, he insisted, was the only thing he was; and between these two insistences he produced both excellent actuarial tables and The Metamorphosis, which suggests that the devouring was incomplete.
What counts the most to me is not the suffering, which he documented abundantly, but the architecture: a man who built, inside a fully administered life, a second life made entirely of night, and paid for it in sleep, which is to say in the only currency that was actually his. The Institute got the hours it had purchased. The hours it had not purchased went elsewhere, and they are the only hours of his that anyone remembers.
— on Franz Kafka, clerk, of Prague (1883–1924)
Prague will matter this month; so will the figure of the man whose employment is real and whose life happens elsewhere, inside it, invisibly. Kafka hid his second life in the night. The figure we are circling hides his somewhere stranger: inside the work itself, in the one place no supervisor would ever think to look. — L.U.
❧ II. THE PRACTICE ❧
This week, cook one meal entirely from what is already in your kitchen. Buy nothing. Use the half bag of lentils, the questionable onion, the rice that has been waiting since winter, the spice you bought once for a recipe you never made again. Improvise without a recipe and without a supply run.
The practice sounds like thrift, and thrift is its disguise. What it actually trains is the salvage eye: the ability to look at what has been written off, the back of the cupboard, the almost-empty jar, the ingredient with no plan attached, and see material instead of clutter. Most of what we own has been mentally discarded while physically retained, which is the worst of both conditions. For one meal, reverse it: retain nothing mentally that you do not physically use. The meal may be odd. It may also be the best thing you eat all week, and either way you will have made something out of what was already condemned, which, as it happens, is this month's entire theme, though you could not know that yet.
⌂ Estimated effort: one meal, no shopping
☽ Estimated reward: disproportionate, occasionally delicious
❧ III. THE CLUE ❧
THE IDLE PANTHEON · No. II of XII
The second figure will be revealed on the fourth Friday of July.
The first clue, as is now our custom, gives you the shape of the philosophy and nothing else. Biography follows next week; indiscretion the week after.
Clue 1 of 3:
"His work, on paper, is destruction. Every working day for thirty-five years he has performed, in the same place, far below the street, a kind of execution, and he has turned it, privately, without telling anyone, into a liturgy: he cannot destroy a thing without first honoring it, and the honoring takes time, which is why he is so very bad at his job by every measure his superiors know how to take.
He never sought an education. The education arrived in the material he was given to destroy, year after year, until he became, in his own words, learned against his will. He considers this the only honest way wisdom ever comes to anyone: not pursued, but salvaged."
☞ Guesses welcome, and from this month on they earn something. Reply to this email with a guess, any name at all, and a postcard of Zacharias Lichter, the first of the company, will find its way back to you by post: a real card carrying his portrait, written by hand, and mailed from wherever the gazette happens to find itself that week. Do include a postal address if you would like one; it will be used for the card and for nothing else. Wrong guesses earn it exactly as surely as right ones; the gazette has never graded on accuracy, only on the willingness to play. And if you give the word, your try, right or reckless, may be quoted in the next letter under a first name only, so the whole company can see how the hunt is going. The early guess remains my favorite kind.
❧ IV. THE POSTCARD ❧
Freiburg im Breisgau, late afternoon. This is the corner where Germany begins to run out: France sits just across the Rhine, Switzerland an hour down the road, and the town is built in the warm rose-red sandstone of the region, the cathedral wearing it, the old merchant houses wearing it, so that the whole center seems cut from one long sunset. Here and there a half-timbered facade leans into a street like a visitor from an Alsatian village that never went home.
The genius of the place, though, runs along the ground. Threaded through the old center are the Bächle, little water channels a hand's width across, cut in the Middle Ages to water the cattle and sheep of a town that did brisk business in animals. The livestock are centuries gone. The water still runs, clear and quick, and the town has quietly surrendered the whole obsolete infrastructure to idleness. In the warm hours the channels are lined with people who have declined the tables of the wine bars and sit instead on small cushions at the water's edge, glasses in hand, trousers rolled, feet in the stream. Children tow little wooden boats on strings, upstream and down, and they are the backbone of the entire economy of nothing. Folk law holds that whoever steps into a Bächle by accident must marry a Freiburger, which may explain the general carefulness, and the occasional carelessness.
Nobody planned this. The channels were dug for thirsty animals by a town of serious commerce, and centuries later their whole function is to cool the feet of people doing nothing at all. Whether this is the industrious Germans surprising themselves, or France leaking quietly across the Rhine, the water declines to say. It keeps moving; the town, for once, does not.
— Leo Umilio
❧ THE PANTHEON ❧
In order of appearance:
I. Zacharias Lichter.
The roll grows by one each month.
❧ CLOSING NOTE ❧
A month begins the way this one does: with a clerk who hid his life inside the night, a meal built from the condemned shelf, and a clue about a man who honors what he destroys. If these seem like variations on one theme, they are, and the theme will step out of the cellar in three weeks with his name attached.
Until then, the usual liturgy: 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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