3/20/2023 0 Comments Geoff dyer space in timeGeoff Dyer’s latest book, White Sands (Canongate), is out now in paperback. Hours wasted: In one way four, in another zero Even sitting motionless at my desk I can feel it blowing back my hair as though I’m in an open-top car, careering towards oblivion. Sometimes I just sit for an hour, feeling time almost as a physical force. Failing that, I contemplate the most remarkable thing about getting older: the sheer acceleration of time. I do a bit of work, the amount that a mum with a full-time job and two kids could have managed by 10 in the morning. I shower, scarf the bread I’d had the foresight to buy earlier, wrap an ice-pack around my elbow and collapse into something deeper than a nap, more like a half-hearted coma.Īfter this I feel both sharp as a pin and slightly fuzzy, mainly at the edges, but in the aptly named dead centre of my brain too. Another fact is that I trudge home from tennis starving and exhausted. Writers who don’t play tennis twice a week are not writers at all, they’re just faking it. I am talking, I suppose, about tennis, about the way that continuing to play compounds the weaknesses that constant play is intended to overcome.īut it’s only while I’m playing tennis, by the ocean, under the cloudless sky, that I feel I’m living the life of the writer to the full. Needless to say, this constitutes an ongoing, incremental disaster as prevention assumes the symptoms of that which it is trying to alleviate. Maybe I do some work in the writing sense but more and more time is spent either just administering my life or attempting to un-fuck things, trying to prevent things that have gone wrong from becoming full-blown disasters. To make up for lost time I scarf down my soup, buy some bread and trudge back to my desk. It’s full of idiots writing film scripts on their Macs, but I’d as lief work in public as I would take a dump so I hurry-trudge back home, wishing I hadn’t had a coffee because it’s made me: a) desperate to go to the toilet, and b) hungrier than ever, so, after a quick stop at home (see a, above) still more time is wasted as I trudge somewhere for lunch, but the place I trudge to is exactly the same place I’d trudged to for breakfast: Gjusta, where the lunch-line is always huge but I have to wait because there’s nothing in the house except oranges and carrots. Undeterred, I hurry to the aptly named Intelligentsia for a reviving cappuccino. The drift into a nap, steeping my senses in forgetfulness, is lovely emerging from it is awful as I realise I’m behind schedule: late for my elevenses. Some days I don’t really feel like sleeping but I lie down and force myself. Built up over 30-plus years of working at home, the habit of self-discipline means that at the first sign of sleepiness I commit absolutely to a nap. Many writers dread the idea of writing but force themselves to do it. Musicians wake up knowing what they want to do each day: they want to play music, can’t wait to play music. Some days we talk about going somewhere else and then, as we sit down, one of us will remember that we’d intended to go somewhere else but the tug of habit always proves too strong.Īfter my wife goes to her office, a day of uninterrupted work yawns ahead. We go there every day, even when we don’t feel like it. We glug it down so that we can hurry out for breakfast at Gjusta, our local cafe. Making this takes 10 minutes, cleaning up afterwards another 10, while the interval of consumption lasts five seconds, max. Next I prepare orange and carrot and apple juice for myself and my wife. The sun sets as it rises, as the pre-digital Hemingway didn’t quite put it. This alone is enough to destroy the day at the very moment it begins. I remember reading somewhere that the best time for writing is in the morning when you have easier access to the unconscious – ie when you’re half asleep – but because of the eight-hour time difference, my day in Los Angeles starts with emailing so I can have easier access to people in London, before the working day there ends. I’m always hungry, always out foraging – in a transactional sense – for food. I live like a hunter-gatherer without the wandering or the contentment anthropologists claim is the defining feature of such societies.
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