The Art of the Wasted Day

 

Any Good Books, July 2023

The Art of the Wasted Day

Patricia Hampl (Penguin, 2019)

The never-ending to-do list seems to be a fundamental problem of modern life; I’m never averse to reading about how to manage it better. That said, what Patricia Hampl is after here is harder than that: what is the actual alternative? What did Michel Montaigne know that we have forgotten? Come to that, what did she know as an eight-year-old girl, lying in the shade of a backyard beechwood tree, that we have forgotten? “There is no language for this, not then, not even now, this inner glide, articulation of the wordless, plotless truth of existence.” That girl will grow up to be a daydream believer, though she has already been told by the nuns that daydreaming is ‘an occasion of sin.’ It just may be delicious enough to be worth going to hell for.

Of course, she also grew up to be an ordinary adult with a to-do list, which is pleasant enough in its academic and household details. “Whole decades can go this way–and have–not just in domestic detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and success, responsibility and reward.” Assuming that the end of toil does not coincide with the end of life, there’s still the problem of what makes life worth living. Yoga and meditation, offered as solutions, seem like a peculiarly American approach, inasmuch as they seem to be material for an ever more highly evolved to-do list.

So Hampl, following the death of the man she lived with and loved for more than three decades, sets out to visit some settings of legendary leisure. First, she went to Llangollen, Wales, the retreat of a couple of ladies from Ireland. They moved in together in 1778, when Lady Eleanor Butler was about forty, and her companion, Sarah Ponsonby, was twenty-four. In their day, they were famous for their seclusion, which is an inconvenient thing to be famous for. “...[B]oth Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and ‘stare,’ apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies. Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron–and a distant relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott.”

What did the famous and fashionable find at the secluded cottage? A sort of secular cloister, ordered by a System of daily times for walks, correspondence, reading, and study. “They seemed to experience liberation precisely because of the limititation of the System. This insistence on the ideal use of time was the point of their life together. The tournaquet of the System was a saving ligature.” Within it, for fifty years, they had all the time in the world. Similarly, the Ladies chose to wear black riding habits and men’s top hats, and never had to think about clothing again. They’d prefer to think about books, and gardening. This is obviously a way of life also made possible by a live-in servant and scrounged funding from the families back home in Ireland; still, it shows the possibilities.

As she travels, Hampl is reading Montaigne, whose tower is the later object of her pilgrimage. He lived and worked in a tower on the grounds of the family château, thoughtfully furnished with a private chapel on the ground floor, which he could listen in on from his upper room. He thought of his essays as ‘meddling with writing,’ though surely he labored over that informality, rewriting and polishing his one book. But Montaigne was right: all he had to do was describe what he was thinking. “Sit there and describe. And because the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life. The little world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into the great world.”

If the thirst for narrative drives your reading, this book is not for you, but I’m glad to read an argument for the rest of what impels my reading, since I wouldn’t have known just what to call it. “What characterizes the rise of memoir in recent times is precisely the opposite condition–not a gripping ‘narrative arc,’ but the quality of voice, the story of perception rather than action.” Those voice and their descriptions bring me to places I haven’t seen just as surely as tales of climbing Everest would. Actually, there is a thread of narrative, not only in the journeys to stand in the places her subjects stood, but the filament of her relationship, remembering the things her beloved said and did, and the warmly humorous regard he held for her. Even in flashes, it’s a lovely thing to witness.