Day 0131

Enjoyed picking up a pulpy book and reading it in the park. Vagabonding by Rolf Potts. Liberal use of quotations from Walden and a general desire to be positive and to help you "actualize" your potential; just the stuff for an afternoon session of sun damage sur l’herbe.

Went to the Reina Sofia in the evening. The museum itself is like a piece of performance art and it has unsettled me. Huge collection, endless big white rooms with no one in them but the catatonic attendants.

It looked like cruel and unusual torture for them. They sit there in silence, ignored by the few lost souls who wander by, confronted by sarcastic, self-satisfied and sneering art that no one is paying any attention to, sometimes trapped in ear-shot of a video installation playing an endless loop of discordant, jarring, mechanical, alienating, grating clangs and crashes and screeches and whistles. Room after room. One lady checks her watch and stares at the wall. A man is slumped in a doorway talking to himself. A lady has her back to the empty room of huge canvases and gazes out of the only window. An old lady stands on duty in a dark room with slowly revolving platters of plastic figurines and a flickering projector.

Oppressive weight of lost time, a prisonlike pointless confinement of humanity. Too clear a representation of all of the grinding tedium endured by so many day in and day out. For what? Just to get a few euros an hour.