Full-life

[wynand]

So Anna did this totally disgusting, horrible drawing of herself ( this should maybe not come as a surprise to most of us) and talked about how it was the first thing she's done in a long time that was actually satisfying to work on in and of itself, rather than as any means to a larger end. I was kind of depressed about this, since it has been a pretty long time since I did anything ah-tistic that was satisfying in and of itself (Chairs, I guess) rather than satisfying in some long-term sense, satisfying only after hours and hours of fairly tedious yet fulfilling toil in order to appreciate a pretty well-wrought final product. Then today after work I was completely wrecked and planned to spend the evening re-reading old Robert Crumb comics and playing Final Fantasy VII--oh why not, I thought. But I couldn't stop thinking about this scene I had to write for the novel, in which Nikos and Lyons come across this jovial, cracked old Christian who drives a Pontiac, and so at 9:30 I went out to go and have a cup of coffee and a croissant, sit in the coffeehouse smoking slow cigarettes while listening to Elliot Smith, and write this. And it was actually enjoyable, in and of itself, to write this scene. It is kind of cool that my mad envy lasted such a short time--more to the point, that it's actually possible to do this kind of thing any more for its own immediate sake, rather than its own long-term sake. That endless pages of largely get-it-done style work eventually pays off when you get to write the scenes you've been waiting to write; when the scaffolding falls away and you can just get to decorating the actual house. That really, doing artsy crap for pleasure is ultimately the only excuse for it.

It's maybe sad that the prerequisite for a full life, it seems, is spending half of your time awake doing something that you mildly dislike in exchange for money. Somehow all time seems well spent when you do that.