Two friends recently gave me a copy of Patricia Hampl's new book, The Art of the Wasted Day. It's a memoir about Hampl's lifetime desire for leisure, meaning not passive entertainment but rather "the life of the mind." (Hampl's book A Romantic Education, first published in 1981, is considered the start of the modern memoir.) A couple weeks ago the three of us had intended to go together to hear her read and speak at Macalester College in St. Paul, the city where she's from and about which she has often lovingly written, but I had to back out because of an evening work conference call. It seemed ironic to pull out of a reading about leisure due to work, particularly because the last book I wrote had explored the conflict between leisure and work. My friends went, however, and gifted me with the book.
Hampl posits an interesting question: Does leisure suggest a life in which you stay put, "lie low," or one in which you "journey"? It's an interesting question and she structures her book along these lines in three sections: Timelessness, To Go, and To Stay. I am still reading it but wanted to already share a section:
“But if leisure (the leisure that promotes the life of the mind) is what’s missing from our overamped world, if the rich multi-tasked life is the problem, shouldn’t a person stay put, lie low? .... This is the dilemma, my dilemma, maybe an essential contemporary middle-class dilemma: To stay? Or to go? Be Pascal? Or be Chaucer? ....
If you’re a “seeker” (and who, opening a book, is not?), isn’t the open road the only way, paradoxically, to find the lost life of daydream where all the rest–wisdom, decency, generosity, compassion, joy, and plain honesty–are sequestered?
If life is a journey, has it just become a getaway to somewhere warm on JetBlue?”
I'm sure I'll post more about this book when I've finished.
~~~
ps. I've written a couple other posts about Patricia Hampl: click here to find.
[Photo: taken of emerging fiddlehead ferns.]