Or Conscience vs. the Muse, Round One
I was going to write something witty and philosophical or at least try, but my mind has called in with a bit of a temperature and begged off…
The last two weeks have been rather… full – of trips, people, presentations, conferences, interviews, talks and other things – so that as someone who generally can count a week’s worth of words on his fingers, I have literally run out. I have also been working on other texts, all for rather more solemn endeavors, and my conscience, being the serious Cerberus it is, makes sure the disapproval is felt, and has had a restraining order issued on the Malicious Muse of Idle Typing and Wayward Newsletters.
Thus, I am condemned to a few months of hard labour until I work my way back ahead of deadlines. (I am, for my sins, rather like Boxer in Animal Farm – no imagination, just work harder…)
Moreover, letters are starting to pile up again; my brief reprieve indeed short-lived, and I’m falling behind once more. I also foolishly ordered a spate of books from amazon, all with obscure titles on resolutely Delphic subjects, where the abstruse vies with the recondite (all the while jostling the arcane for elbow room), and which I must read as research for the next book. (My wife’s eyes roll back in her lovely head when shipments like this arrive, as she utters the resigned sigh of the long-suffering yet stoic. Lucky she doesn’t know about the big shipment of ridiculously expensive oil paints due any day now, which I hope to sneak directly into the garage without passing Go.)
But, so that you don’t think my horizon is totally grey in this solemn tale of minor woes, I did spend a wonderful Saturday last weekend in an abandoned Chartreuse in the Bernese Oberland, sketching away, firmly ensconced in a Victorian settee with brocade cushions in a Baroque church reconverted to a luminous mezzanine loft, very much the setting Terry Gilliam or Federico Fellini might choose to make a movie in, and wandering about in the overgrown cemetery pondering the perfect angle at which abandoned headstones acquire rakishness – a sort of Golden Mean à la Tristram Shandy of Romanticism and Melancholie, which naturally also involves precise dosage of moss and ivy (having said that, I doubt Fibonacci ever considered a churchyard praxis, though the strutting resident peacock had his spirals well rehearsed.)
This is one of the perks of being the official chauffeur of my musical duo of wife and son, who had a day-long rehearsal there.
Here is a photo of the sky taken on the way home. (No Photoshop, straight from the camera. Honest.)
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But, as the saying goes, ce n’est qu’un au revoir.
See you all in a few weeks.
