❧ NOTE FROM THE EDITOR ❧
Welcome to the seventh letter.
It is the heart of summer, and the continent is performing its annual disappearance: the out-of-office replies are blooming, the cities are exchanging their residents for visitors, and publications I subscribe to have announced, in apologetic italics, that they are taking a break until September. The gazette will not be among them, and not out of industriousness, which would be against our religion, but because a Friday letter about doing nothing has no season to escape from. Other publications take breaks from their work. This one would be taking a break from rest, which is a knot I decline to tie. The letters continue, at the hour of two, all Fridays.
I owe you an account of the correspondence, because the second figure has set off more of it than any before him, and the replies have been the best part of my July. One arrived this week from a reader who joined only in the second week and confessed to being happily behind, and who wrote that the letters had put a rest point into an otherwise hectic working life. A rest point is precisely the most this publication hopes to be: not another thing to keep up with, but the place in the week where keeping up is suspended. If you are behind, you are reading it correctly. Nothing here expires, and the gazette waits better than almost anything else in your inbox.
Then the guesses. The clue about the man in the cellar went out, and the replies came back, some circling, some startlingly close, none of which I will confirm or deny, that being the whole liturgy of the thing. One reader offered Diogenes, the philosopher of the barrel who asked an emperor to stop blocking his sunlight, which is not the figure but is unmistakably his ancestor; every idler we meet this year descends from that man somehow, as I stated previously. That was Marcus, who has kindly allowed his beautifully wrong answer into the record. Another produced the scientist who lived underground in a cave until his sense of time dissolved, a magnificent miss now lodged high on a private list I keep of figures the readers have discovered for me. And one reader deduced the occupation itself, a person employed to destroy who chose instead to absorb what he was hired to erase, arriving at the whole silhouette without the name, which is the harder trick and the more elegant one. That was Liam, who allowed me to say so. The others I honor here unnamed, as promised, until they give the word.
And that is the standing invitation, restated, because it is the most fun this gazette offers. Reply to any letter with a guess at the month's figure, any name at all, right or ferociously wrong, and a postcard of the previous figure finds its way to you by post: a real card carrying his portrait, written by hand, mailed from wherever the gazette happens to find itself that week. Zacharias Lichter, first of the company, is presently the card in the post; guess at the man in the cellar and he is yours. Say the word, too, if your guess may appear here in a future letter, first name only, so the whole table can see how the hunt is going. Silence keeps you off the record, honorably; both are welcomed.
While the machines of summer idle, I have also been writing back at length to one correspondent in particular, a former hospital chaplain who arrived through a kind word about idleness and stayed to hand me the most serious idea anyone has offered this publication: that a culture measuring life by output must hide death for the very same reason it wars on the idle hour, since both are unproductive territory, and it exiles them together. That conversation is becoming something. More on it when it ripens.
Two pieces of reading, for the idle hours the season is finally supplying. The first is an essay that went up on the gazette's own site, The Bench at the Gate, which is the longest thing this publication has yet published and, I should confess, an argument conducted with a friend. When Kai Brach's Dense Discovery kindly pointed its readers here some weeks ago, Kai raised an objection worth more than a passing reply: that most people who rest do so not by philosophy but by arithmetic, because it is all the time they have, and that idleness talk can ring like a luxury sold to people who cannot afford it. He was right, and being right, he earned a whole essay in response. The Bench at the Gate grants the objection in full and then spends its length arguing with a single word inside it, the word afford, from a bench outside a Transylvanian village gate where idleness was never a luxury and never optional. The second is The Pillow on the Windowsill, for a slower sort of afternoon. Finally, Six Hours by the Moving Water, for the fathers who need the river the way the rest of us need air, and for anyone who has watched one go and never quite understood the pull. If either speaks to you, consider passing it to someone exhausted by the constant demand for more. If either finds you, it may find someone you know as well; send it on.
The second figure's portrait is two weeks away. Today's clue is the biographical one, the close-to-the-bone one, and it contains, among other furniture, a machine, a quantity of beer that I will not be defending in court, and the most beautiful thing I know of that anyone has ever done with a condemned book.
Now then. To the letter.
❧ I. THE FRAGMENT ❧
The most terrifying book collector in literature is a sinologist named Peter Kien, who lives in Vienna inside a private library of twenty-five thousand volumes and regards the entire world outside it as an unfortunate rumor. Kien is the creation of Elias Canetti, who gave him a mind of total scholarly discipline and the practical wisdom of a hinge. The novel's central catastrophe begins with a misreading so small it breaks the heart: Kien's housekeeper, a grasping woman named Therese, borrows a book from him and handles it with exaggerated reverence, wearing gloves, resting it on a cushion, and Kien, watching, concludes that he has found the one other person on earth who understands what a book is. He marries her. She was not revering the book. She was appraising it. The marriage proceeds from this error the way a fire proceeds from a spark, and the novel ends, years and ruins later, with Kien alone among his shelves, and the fire is no longer a metaphor, and I will leave it there.
Canetti called the book Die Blendung, the blinding, and Kien is exactly that: a man blinded by print, who loved books with a totality that left no love over for anything books are about. He is the cautionary opposite of this month's figure, and the difference between them is the whole lesson: it is possible to own twenty-five thousand books and rescue nothing, and it is possible to own almost nothing and rescue a civilization in your head.
— on Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé (1935)
Kien hoarded upward, into a fortress; our figure salvages downward, out of a current. One of them mistook books for a wall against the world. The other knows they are the world, briefly entrusted to whoever will carry them. — L.U.
❧ II. THE PRACTICE ❧
This week, give something away. Not something you were going to discard; that is disposal wearing a halo. Something you still want, or half-want, that another person would want more: a book you loved and will not reread, a coat, the duplicate of anything. Hand it to a person, directly, not to a donation bin, because the bin launders the gift into logistics and the practice lives in the handing.
Notice the small resistance as the object leaves: the voice that says but I might need it. You will not need it. That voice has never once been right in the entire history of voices. What you are actually feeling is the object's weight transferring from your inventory to your memory, where it becomes, instantly, lighter and more permanent at once. The figure we are circling this month has spent thirty-five years receiving what that voice in other people finally surrendered, and he has built a life from it, which proves the things we release are not lost. They are merely re-shelved, elsewhere, in better company.
⌂ Estimated effort: one object, one hand, one small ache ☽
Estimated reward: disproportionate
❧ III. THE CLUE ❧
THE IDLE PANTHEON · No. II of XII
The second figure will be revealed in two weeks, on the fourth Friday of July.
Clue 2 of 3:
"He works in a cellar, beneath a courtyard, beneath a city of a hundred spires, with a machine whose entire purpose is compression. Wastepaper falls to him through a hole in the ceiling like weather. His job is to feed the machine, and he does, slowly, far too slowly, because he reads what he kills, and because hidden in the gray tonnage there arrive, every week, condemned books, and he cannot let them pass.
The ones he saves go home with him. His small flat has surrendered to them entirely; they line the walls and roof his bed on planks, two tons of rescued thought suspended over his sleep, so that he rests each night beneath the weight of everything he refused to destroy. He drinks beer in quantities that are not a vice but, he insists, a professional instrument: the work cannot be done sober, because done sober it would only be work. And to every bale he crushes he gives a burial: an open classic laid at its heart, a reproduction of an old master wrapped around its face, so that even the garbage of his city leaves the world dressed for somewhere better."
☞ Guesses welcome, and rewarded. Reply to this email with any name, and last month's portrait comes to you by post. Next week, the final clue abandons all discretion.
❧ IV. THE POSTCARD ❧
Sînpetru Almașului, Transylvania, two o'clock in the afternoon. The village has stopped. Not slowed: stopped. The heat stands in the road like a visitor nobody invited and nobody has the energy to send away. The chickens have withdrawn their candidacies. A dog crosses from one shade to a better shade, the full journey of the hour, and collapses with the sigh of a being who has done what could be done.
Somewhere behind a fence a radio is playing to no one. The hay smell comes in waves, and under it, faintly, the cooler smell of the well. Nothing will move here until five or later, by common consent older than any of the houses, and the houses are old. I came out to check on the lumber and have instead been checked on by the hour itself, which found me, judged me too warm for labor, and assigned me to the bench.
It is two o'clock, the hour this letter goes out. Now you know where the policy comes from.
— Leo Umilio
❧ THE PANTHEON ❧
In order of appearance:
The roll grows by one each month.
❧ CLOSING NOTE ❧
The thread of the week, drawn straight: a man who hoarded books and saved nothing, a practice of letting one object go, and a clue about a man who owns little and has saved tonnage. Possession and rescue turn out to be different verbs entirely, and the second one is the only one the Pantheon canonizes.
Next Friday, the final clue, the indiscreet one, with a city, a date, and an author in it. The portrait follows on the twenty-fourth, and with it the first postcards go into the post, to everyone who played.
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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