7/2/2023 0 Comments A wasted life book![]() ![]() Almost like secular nuns, “the Ladies of Llangollen” made a virtue of solitary pastoral living, so foreign to our modern sensibilities. In this she is backed up not only by Gregor Mendel, the Austrian genetics pioneer who lived as a monk, but also by two obscure figures from 18th-century history, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who fled Ireland to live together as friends and lovers in remote Wales. Hampl also affirms the value of living a life of orderly solitude, of the freedom arising from discipline. 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.” It’s the same conviction that animates autofiction by the likes of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard: the magic is in the day-to-day details. “Montaigne felt compelled,” Hampl notes, “though nothing had happened to him, to write books about it. “He loafs and invites his soul,” Hampl writes, here adapting the words of Walt Whitman, another determined dreamer. Her hero, to whom she keeps looping around in this book, is Michel de Montaigne, “the first modern daydreamer.” His essays were snapshots of the human spirit. It’s a float, my body a cloud drifting along, effortless but aware.” Yet she was also aware early on that such apparent idleness would earn her the world’s disapproval the family’s housekeeper saw her as “ girl up to no good, lazing my days away A time-waster.”īy contrast, adult life, Hampl notes, is overwhelmingly deadline-driven - “Life conceived - and lived - as a to-do list.” While she recognizes her luck in having a full and purposeful life of teaching and writing, she looks to historical role models to learn how to break away from the self-imposed frenzy and find fulfillment in quiet moments. “The green filigree patterns the sky, light filters my face,” and time stands still to spotlight for her what really matters: “It’s not that you make things up - you notice things.” Even as a child, Hampl recalls believing that the stillness and the observation were vital: “Really, life is - this. Hampl remembers lazy 1950s summer days when she would lie on the grass under the beechnut tree to escape family drama and the background angst of world war. It’s a pensive, pleasantly meandering book that blends memoir with travel and biographical information about some of Hampl’s exemplars of solitary, introspective living, and it begins, quite literally, with daydreaming. But Hampl has published poetry, too, and the poet’s delight in lyricism and free association is in evidence in her latest work, The Art of the Wasted Day (2018). Other autobiographical works tackled her Catholic upbringing, the workings of memory, the sublime, and - in her most conventional memoir, The Florist’s Daughter (2007) - the death of her parents. Patricia Hampl first came to prominence with A Romantic Education (1981), based on a trip behind the Iron Curtain to explore her Czech heritage. But what if we abandoned this obsession with what we can achieve with our time, and instead gave ourselves over, at least for a while, to daydreaming and idleness? Would we find that we were freer to be creative and to rearrange our lives into healthier patterns? Some recent books suggest that we should change our idea of what constitutes using time wisely. THERE’S A MOUNTAIN of self-help books out there giving time management strategies and urging us to take charge of our days and wring every drop of usefulness out of them. ![]()
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