Book Report: The Art of the Wasted Day

35. Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (2020) (12/30/2020)

This lovely book is part travelogue (sort of), part memoir (sort of)—an assemblage of "vignettes" that take us, and more importantly the author, all over the world as she summons up memories that don't tell a coherent story per se, but rather contribute to the patchwork of experiences that make her precisely who she is. Invoking the essai-ist Montaigne (shown below), who famously said, "I do not portray being: I portray passing" (Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage)—by which, as Hampl puts it, he means "the inner tick-tock of thought"—she muses on the nature of memory, of constructing a life, of paying attention, of finding meaning. It's philosophy, but it is firmly rooted in specific instances of joy and understanding.

The book is, in a way, a love letter to Hampl's husband of 27 years, Terrence Williams, who died suddenly in 2015 at age 86 (Hampl herself is now 74)—for he is the refrain of the "you" who is sometimes on the page and otherwise never far from it. The moment of their meeting, when she moved into a new apartment and the downstairs neighbor called to introduce himself and show her the location of the garbage cans, is part of the patchwork. Trips she takes to her family homeland of Czechoslovakia, to research Gregor Mendel and his patient effort to find pattern in the natural world; to Wales, to learn about "the Ladies of Llangollen," a pair of well-to-do young Irish women who in 1778 "eloped" from the claustrophobia of their Kilkenny homes to create their own "life of the mind" together; a visit to Montaigne's tower; a trip with Terrence by Chris-Craft cabin cruiser from their home of St. Paul, Minnesota, to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. But together with these goal-oriented excursions, we learn of things that happen along the way—conversations with friends and family, chance encounters, serendipitous stopovers, small delights. Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Rilke and James Wright, Chaucer and Colette, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, Dickinson and Whitman, Debussy and Schubert, Linnaeus and Rousseau, Proust and Kobe Bryant, are referenced, enlarging the ideas being explored. 

Here's a philosophical passage that nibbles at one aspect of the overarching project of this book:

The final page of any novel is a destination, the creation of form offering the illusion of inevitability, the denial of chaos. We don't love novels because they are like life, but because they are unlike it—deftly organized, filled with the satisfaction of shape. This shapeliness isn't "closure," a modern comfort word too airlessly psychological for the deep gratifications storytelling provides. The great carapace of the novel puts a bridle on the stampede of detail.
     And yet the great unsorted pile of detail—that's what a life is. Not the organization of details into shape (that's the novel), but the recognition of the welter of life—notetaking, James's ineluctable consequence of one's greatest inward energy . . . to take them . . . as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember.
     You understood—I think you did—that I didn't think of notetaking as material, bricks for the great architecture of a book, even if Henry James did. I was taking them for themselves. Life is not a story, a settled version. It's an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art. Call them vignettes, these things we finger and drop again into their shoebox.

Those thoughts in no way encapsulate the book, though. It is bursting with life, curiosity, and appreciations. What we are privy to in this book are precisely the snaps that she has lifted out of the shoebox, shuffled now this way, now that, as they all fit together in ever enlarging ways.