The Idle Gazette | 9

❧ NOTE FROM THE EDITOR ❧

Welcome to the ninth letter, and to the second feast day of this calendar.

You know the ceremony now: the letter runs long today, the brevity rule is suspended, and somewhere below a man steps out of a month of clues into the full light of his portrait. Pour something; he would approve, more than approve, of the beer especially, and would consider it not an accompaniment to the reading but a professional requirement.

❧ THE ROLL, WITH VERDICTS ❧

And now the part that so far was sealed: the verdicts. Eight readers entered the cellar this month, and the gazette is pleased to report that the man was found twice, missed five times with tremendous style, and once described so accurately without a name that the miss deserves its own display case.

The laurel goes to Armaan, of Chennai, and it goes to him with the committee still shaking its head. The first clue carried no city, no author, no biography, nothing but a philosophy of slow destruction, and Armaan replied within hours, drumroll included, with the correct name. Solving a man from his beliefs alone is the connoisseur's method, and the records will show it was done before most of the company had finished their coffee. He then, unprompted, handed the editor a gift about this very figure that will surface in a future letter, because of course he did. Armaan, take a bow.

The second correct verdict belongs to Kristin, of Virginia, who managed something almost as improbable: she joined the gazette on a Monday and named the figure by Wednesday, two clues in hand, no biography yet published, fan mail attached which was savored as a delicacy requires.

We mentioned some of these already, but a full recap is fully deserved for the honorable misses, each one a small essay in how to be wrong beautifully. Marcus, of Rhode Island, proposed Diogenes, which is not the figure but is his great-great-grandfather; every idler in this Pantheon descends from the man in the barrel. Liam, of Georgia, submitted no name at all and instead deduced the entire occupation, a man employed to destroy who absorbs what he was hired to erase. A correspondent in Denmark, unnamed at his own unhurried pace, offered the scientist who lived in a cave until time dissolved in his hands, a miss so magnificent it has been added to the gazette's private list of figures the readers discover for me. Neil, of South Carolina, nominated Wonko the Sane, a man who built his house inside-out so the asylum was everything beyond the walls, wrong, but so much in the family spirit that our beloved patron of the month would stand him a beer and possibly a second one. Alexandra, of Connecticut, came within a single door of the answer: she named Hrabal himself, the maker rather than the made, which under Pantheon law is knocking at the landlord's when the tenant is home. And Hannah, of Oakland, our newest player, reached outside literature entirely and named José Alberto Gutiérrez, the real Bogotá garbageman who built a library from what the city threw away: not a wrong answer at all, merely a correct one filed in a parallel universe.

Every one of the eight receives Lichter by post, handwritten, the wrong answers exactly as surely as the right.

Now then. To the letter, and to the second of the twelve.

❧ THE REVEAL ❧

THE IDLE PANTHEON · No. II of XII

He comes from Too Loud a Solitude, written by Bohumil Hrabal in Prague in 1976, a book of barely a hundred pages that could not be published in the country it described and so spent thirteen years traveling hand to hand in samizdat, copy to copy, exactly as its hero's rescued books travel, until 1989, when the regime fell and the book walked out into daylight along with everything else. Hrabal himself held court for decades over beer at the Golden Tiger, retired to a cottage where he was contentedly outnumbered by cats, and died in 1997 falling from a fifth-floor hospital window while feeding the pigeons, the story goes, and Prague has been arguing with that sentence ever since. He wrote many books; he said, more than once, that this small one was the reason he had been put on earth.

Haňťa, then. For thirty-five years he has worked a hydraulic press in a cellar beneath Prague, compacting the city's wastepaper into bales. Paper falls to him through a hole in the ceiling like weather. His job, on the books, is destruction, and he is spectacularly bad at it, the slowest compactor in the city, forever behind quota, forever shouted at from above, because he reads what he is sent to kill. Hidden in the gray tonnage there arrive, every week, condemned books, and he cannot let them pass: he wipes his hands, lifts them out, and takes them home, where they have conquered the flat entirely and roof his bed on planks, two tons of rescued thought suspended over his sleep. He calls himself educated against his will: thirty-five years of salvage have built, in his head, without a single intention, a complete civilization, Kant and Lao Tzu and Novalis shelved between the mice and the beer. And the beer is not a vice; it is, he insists, an instrument of the trade, because the work done sober would only be work, and the work done his way is a liturgy. Every bale he crushes receives 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.

His enemy, when it comes, does not wear a uniform. It wears gloves. A new giant press opens at Bubny, worked by a brigade of cheerful young men in caps who handle paper without reading a line of it and drink milk, virtuously, on their break, and Haňťa understands at one glance what they are: the future, efficient, hygienic, and illiterate in the only way that matters. They do in an hour what takes him a day, precisely because nothing passes through their hands into their heads. Progress has no argument with Haňťa; it simply has no further use for him, which is worse. His ending I will leave inside the book, where Hrabal handles it with more tenderness than any summary could; I will say only that he remains faithful to his press, and to his loves, past the last page.

He is the second figure because he answers the first. Lichter refused the world loudly, from the street, in rapture; Haňťa refuses it silently, from below, in salvage. One is the Pantheon's prophet, the other its monk. And of all our twelve, he is the one who states the gazette's deepest article of faith in the fewest words: that attention is a form of love, that love is a form of rescue, and that no hour spent reading anything worth reading has ever, on any honest ledger, been wasted.

❧ THE STANDING❧

His standing in the five measures of our science. The full detailed standing lives on his page, for those who want the argued version.

Idleness: 8. A high mark for a man who held one job for thirty-five years, and the mark is the point: he slowed the work to the speed of reading and moved in. The press exists so the reading can happen; the job is a hermitage with a salary. Minus two because he does, in the end, make the bales, and makes them beautifully.

Wisdom: 9. Docked a single point for the reason he would insist on himself: he can no longer tell which thoughts are his own and which came down through the hole with the paper.

Wanderlust: 2. The lowest mark yet awarded. A staircase, a cellar, a tavern; his travels are conducted through the rescued pages, the only tourism he has ever trusted. Everything worth visiting has already been thrown away, and it all, eventually, comes down his hole.

Defiance: 9. Quiet, total, and never once announced. His lateness is his politics; his cellar is a resistance cell with a staff of one. Missing a point because his refusal never learns to say no aloud.

Sociability: 4. Low, and tender in its lowness: authors he argues with, mice who share his sandwiches, a professor or two who know which cellar to visit. Not a hermit by grievance but by acoustics; the company he keeps simply cannot be heard by everyone.

His page is now open: the portrait to download and keep, the full argued standing, and the company he joins at The Pantheon, two figures now, ten rooms still dark.

❧ THE BOOK ❧

The portrait is for the wall; the book is for the pocket, where it fit through thirteen years of samizdat, and where Haňťa would say a book belongs. If he has won you over, a hundred pages stand between you and the cellar, and here is where to find them, sent to the right door rather than the nearest one.

The edition to own in English is Michael Henry Heim's translation, Too Loud a Solitude, which carries the beer and the tenderness across without spilling either; bookshop.org will route the order through an independent shop rather than the obvious warehouse, which in this book's case is not merely a preference but practically a plot point.

❧ THE FRAGMENT ❧

For thirty-five years, Hrabal's hero tells us in the book's opening breath, he has been in wastepaper, and "it's my love story." It is the most disarming first move in Czech literature: a man introduces his life at the bottom of the world, beneath a Prague courtyard, beside a hydraulic press, buried in falling paper, and the word he reaches for is love. The pages that follow keep the promise of that word with a tenderness that has no business surviving in a cellar.

— on Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (1976)

Longtime readers may feel a flicker of recognition, and rightly: he passed through this gazette once before, weeks ago, hiding in plain sight in a Fragment, back when he was nobody's saint and just a man I could not stop thinking about. The Pantheon was always going to come for him. — L.U.

❧ THE PRACTICE ❧

A feast-day practice, in the master's own discipline. This week, write a letter by hand, on paper, to someone who once helped you and was never properly thanked: a teacher, an old friend, a stranger who did one kind thing and vanished from your life but not from your accounting. Then send it, by the slow post, with a stamp, the full nineteenth-century ritual.

Two reasons it must be paper, and both belong to this month's figure. First, a handwritten letter cannot be skimmed, forwarded, or processed; it can only be read, once, slowly, by one person. Second, a letter is a small bet placed on paper's side of an old war: the conviction that some things deserve to take up space in the world, to be carried by trucks and humans, to arrive creased, to be kept in a drawer and found again in thirty years by someone clearing the house. Gratitude does not expire. It only waits, gaining interest, for paper.

⌂ Estimated effort: one page, one stamp, one walk to the postbox
☽ Estimated reward: disproportionate, on both ends

❧ THE POSTCARD ❧

Cluj-Napoca, four in the afternoon. The clouds have come down low and stayed, a ceiling of gray wool pressing gently on every head still left in the city to press on, of which there are, this week, remarkably few. The barometer has opinions and my skull is receiving them. This is the special sleepiness of a low sky over an emptied town: not tiredness, exactly, but a kind of municipal drowsiness, as if the city itself has taken something for the pain and is waiting for it to work.

The inhabitants are elsewhere, and they have split, as they do every year, into two congregations. One half stands shoulder to shoulder in the roar of the festival a few hills away, celebrating in a sea of people, which is the only sea this landlocked place can produce on its own. The other half has gone looking for the genuine article, driving the long day south to salt water, as far from here as their holidays can carry them. Between the two seas, the crowd and the coast, the city has been left to its pigeons, its pensioners, and me, and the three of us are managing the estate honorably: someone has to hold the benches down. - Leo Umilio

❧ CLOSING NOTE ❧

The feast ends, and a small luxury follows it. Next Friday is the fifth Friday of July, and the gazette will keep it as an interlude: no clue, no reveal, nothing for sale, nothing advanced. The Pantheon rests between figures and the third figure will not begin to surface until August. Next week's letter is the year's first letter about nothing in particular, and I have been looking forward to it for a month.

Of the third figure I will say only this, to leave something flickering: he is the strangest of the twelve, a man who does not so much live his life as get carried through it, like a coin in a stranger's pocket.

The usual liturgy, then: 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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