Day 0012

The tyranny of money, the repugnance of work. I want to devote myself completely to reading and drawing and thinking and yet every so often the exigencies of daily life get in the way.

I read about Proust and Tolstoy and identify with them and their characters, forgetting that whilst I may have all of their youthful indolence, lack of self-discipline and reckless extravagance, I differ from them in one critical aspect: I lack a considerable inheritance.

And so I am continually wrenched from the airy heights of dilettantism to the sordid daily grind so I can get the money I need to whisk me around the world to bombard myself with distractions from the various existential angsts and adult responsibilities that loom.

I despise it, I despise work channelling my thoughts away from me, leaching my energy from me and diverting it to tasks of invariable meaninglessness. With my pathologically high opinion of myself I feel like Marvin, the paranoid android...

"Come on," he droned, "I've been ordered to take you down to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Or, to put it more poetically:

They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up;
And they enclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red, round globe, hot burning,
Till all from life I was obliterated and erasèd.William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion

I can't bring myself not to resent it, even though I need the money and I should be grateful for the work. I can't shake the awareness that for some people money is not, nor ever will be, a problem. I know Tolstoy renounced his worldly possessions, but that's easy enough to do once you've already spent years having fun squandering them. I am considering the same pattern; dissipate what remains of my youth and burn through my little all to become a hermit living on the breadline.

Today I copied Rubens' drawing of Nicolaas Rubens wearing a coral necklace.