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A review by tombuoni
The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
A book about solitude, writing, and discovering leisure. Interlinked essays and personal reflections journey through the author’s childhood growing up Catholic in the Midwest, the grief of losing her husband, and traveling to visit the homes of notable experts in leisure - particularly Montaigne and the Ladies of Llangollen.
“Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem.”
“Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow.”
“But what of lives lived in the flyover? Lives that don’t have that powerful, if terrible, historical resonance of radical suffering. Ordinary lives. Mine in middling Minnesota in the middle of the twentieth century. Why bother to describe it? Because all details are divine, not just Nabokov’s. In fact, the poorer the supposed value, the more the detail requires description to attest to its divinity.”
“The essayist sits—he also paces—in his tower. He loafs and invites his soul—as Whitman calls this kind of work three centuries later. Montaigne can survey his entire estate, spread before him from his library where he writes and inquires of himself. His mind forms “so frivolous and vain a subject,” he warns the reader on the first page of his book, it’s a waste of time for anyone else to bother with it.”
— The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
https://a.co/7f44TRb
“Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem.”
“Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow.”
“But what of lives lived in the flyover? Lives that don’t have that powerful, if terrible, historical resonance of radical suffering. Ordinary lives. Mine in middling Minnesota in the middle of the twentieth century. Why bother to describe it? Because all details are divine, not just Nabokov’s. In fact, the poorer the supposed value, the more the detail requires description to attest to its divinity.”
“The essayist sits—he also paces—in his tower. He loafs and invites his soul—as Whitman calls this kind of work three centuries later. Montaigne can survey his entire estate, spread before him from his library where he writes and inquires of himself. His mind forms “so frivolous and vain a subject,” he warns the reader on the first page of his book, it’s a waste of time for anyone else to bother with it.”
— The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
https://a.co/7f44TRb