I have enjoyed a leisurely weekend for the first time in several months. On Thanksgiving Day, I expressed gratitude to friends and family, but I stayed home. I slept late, drank coffee, made a simple breakfast, and read Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, to admire the dyonisian main character and to break with my overly apollonian life of the last few months.
For joy, I spent a couple of hours on a video call, catching up with my friends Ol’ Moose and Monster — we talked philosophy, travel, small cabins hidden in woods and mountains, music, houses, love, friendship.
It rained all Thanksgiving Day, and I loved the quietness it brought to my neighborhood and the tap tap tap of the water as it hit sidewalls, street, and windows.
I have enjoyed this lovely Friday in the same way: long sleep, mid-morning coffee, simple home meals, dyonisian Zorba as liberatory archetype. I am looking forward to a couple of cold beers to ease the evening.
I have felt the joy of solitary, relaxed playfulness and musement. Yesterday, after the rain, I gazed out the window. As the cobalt sky was still resplendent behind the darkening clouds at dusk, I watched the branches of the sycamore tree shake in the wind. Then I looked at the shadows on the ground: the pointed shadow-figures of the leaves slid over the asphalt, like dark dancers moving gracefully under the streetlights. I thought of writing it down in my journal, but I decided to jet let the moment be and to flow with it.
In some ways, I have just been answering the invitation, or rather the convocation, that I received from Michel de Montaigne a few weeks ago. In his essay “Of Experience,” he writes:
We are great fools. ‘He has spent his life in idlessness,’ we say. ‘I have done nothing today.’ What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of your occupations…Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all…To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. –Montaigne
To live our lives, not to produce or accomplish, is our fundamental –I would say, our natural and spontaneous– calling, our vocation. In this passage, Montaigne sounds apollonian, advocating for order and tranquility. But his whole endeavor in the Essays is rather dyonisian: emotional, ludic, whimsical, creative.
Montaigne’s convocation reminded me of several passages from Thoreau, who never tired of issuing convocations to idleness, spontaneity, and wildness to his listeners and readers. This passage from Walden is one of my favorites:
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. –Thoreau
I have spent scattered days like this recently, some near the Tropic of Capricorn in spring, others near the Tropic of Cancer in autumn. But what I want, what I crave and need, is a season–like Thoreau at Walden. May I have the wisdom to live it soon, and may I share it with my Muse.
Daniel G. Campos 