Day 0014

Finished Proust's The Fugitive today, and now on to the last volume of In Search of Lost Time.

I left today's drawing until too late, so rushed it and made a mess of it. It's another from Andrea del Sarto. I realise I don't have to do a finished piece every day and will slow down rather than rush through and not learn anything.

Very conscious of how quickly time is passing. Minutes then hours just slip away, especially when I'm listening to an audiobook and playing Tetris... which I know I shouldn't be doing. Should at least be drawing not mindlessly playing a game.

I'll be on a flight home in three weeks, and being conscious of my limited time I feel guilty when I don't go out and squeeze the most of the day. Not least because I've paid to be here. Today I just worked. This involved not working but not going out, feeling guilty for not at least enjoying myself, then finally getting down to a stroke of work in the evening when I no longer had the possibility of going out and enjoying myself; a pattern I endlessly repeat to no benefit whatsoever. I still can't master myself to get the work done first and enjoy myself as a reward.

Here's Proust from the second in the book on the inability to work (that is, to write):

If only I had been able to start writing! But whatever the conditions in which I approached the task (as, too, alas, the undertakings not to touch alcohol, to go to bed early, to sleep, to keep fit), whether it were with enthusiasm, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing my walk and keeping it in reserve as a reward of industry, taking advantage of an hour of good health, utilising the inactivity forced on me by a day of illness, what always emerged in the end from all my effort was a virgin page, undefiled by any writing, ineluctable as that forced card which in certain tricks one invariably is made to draw, however carefully one may first have shuffled the pack. I was merely the instrument of habits of not working, of not going to bed, of not sleeping, which must find expression somehow, cost what it might; if I offered them no resistance, if I contented myself with the pretext they seized from the first opportunity that the day afforded them of acting as they chose, I escaped without serious injury, I slept for a few hours after all, towards morning, I read a little, I did not over-exert myself; but if I attempted to thwart them, if I pretended to go to bed early, to drink only water, to work, they grew restive, they adopted strong measures, they made me really ill, I was obliged to double my dose of alcohol, did not lie down in bed for two days and nights on end, could not even read, and I vowed that another time I would be more reasonable, that is to say less wise, like the victim of an assault who allows himself to be robbed for fear, should he offer resistance, of being murdered.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way