Almost 3:00pm and I've already been awake for 12 hours. My circadian rhythms have been all out of whack since I got here. Spent most of the day reading before paying one of my storage units a visit (and coming to terms with the impossibility of completely clearing it out this time around) before situating myself at my cafe of choice before picking my son up from school and taking him out to dinner.
Given that it is the 5th, and my newsletter goes out every 10th, I should be drafting it right now, but I kind of have nothing to say. You'd think that between my travels, the workshop I just gave, and war breaking out, now would be just the time to have plenty to say, but I really don't. I'm more in a quietly observational mood right now than anything.
Presently house-sitting for a friend, who just so happens to be safekeeping quite a few of my books. So I took it as an opportunity to read through a few I have yet to finish, and just this morning found myself completing DAILY RITUALS by Mason Currey. Nothing groundbreaking but includes a great many amusing vignettes that I think would be delightful for most creatives to leave through.
“Mencken's routine was simple: work for twelve or fourteen hours a day, every day, and in the late evening, enjoy a drink and conversation. This was his lifestyle as a young bachelor—when he belonged to a drinking club and often met his fellow members at a saloon after work.”
See, it can be done! To be productive and have an active social life. Twelve-to-fourteen hour workdays however strike me as overkill and wholly unnecessary (though I am guilty of it myself from time to time). The sweet spot it seems, if one can extract a commonality between the vast majority of creatives surveyed in the book, is probably working in 3-4 hour shifts. Either breaking before carrying on for another shift, or calling it a day at that. And this even applies to some of the most prolific creators.
Georges Simenon, for example, who published 425 books over the course of his career, only wrote from 6:30 A.M. to 9:30 A.M. “Then he would go for a long walk, eat lunch at 12:30, and take a one-hour nap. In the afternoon he spent time with his children and took another walk before dinner, television, and bed at 10:00 P.M.”
This schedule seemed to allow for a pretty active social life beyond the home and family too. “When living in Paris, Simenon frequently slept with four different women in the same day. He estimated that he bedded ten thousand women in his life. (His second wife disagreed, putting the total closer to twelve hundred.)”
Active social life or not, there is no doubt that many of us are way too pampered compared to the some of the artists of old. Take Willem de Kooning and Elain Fried for example, who would have a breakfast that “consisted mostly of very strong coffee, cut with milk that they kept in winter on a window ledge; they did not have a refrigerator, an appliance that in the early forties was still a luxury –. (So was a private phone, which de Kooning would not have until the early sixties.)”
The heat also automatically went “off after five o'clock because they were commercial buildings.”