Long Sunday

An endless, dreary Sunday afternoon, an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year. By turns walked despairingly down empty streets and lay quietly on the couch. Occasionally astonished by the leaden, meaningless clouds almost uninterruptedly drifting by. ‘You are reserved for a great Monday!’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.
---Kafka.

Anyone who has lived in the west will have a sense of how true these words ring; the paralysing dread that accompanies the end of a Sunday morning. However, this unnameable fear is itself receding as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell one day from the other.

'This picture (Seurat's) is a single mosaic of boredom,...vacant faces, the group of other forms for the most part wooden verticals, like puppets from a toy-box intensely pre-occupied. Hapless idleness and expressionless brooding..an internal (infernal?) utopia of distance...such a bourgeois Sunday afternoon in the landscape of a painted suicide which does not become one only because it even lacks resolution towards itself.'
---E. Bloch.

The restlessness. A thousand projects started, all abandoned. Is it possible to imagine a simple happiness again, a life that is not burdened by the thought of incompleteness, by capitalism's false infinity? And what, exactly, are we to make of holidays that are marketed as 'an escape' , our desire for virtual realities, or the ever more daring demand for 'thrills'? Is this, ultimately, nothing but a sign of our profound boredom, a cry of desperation?

Russell is a timely reminder that there was once a time when the task of the philosopher was to say something about how one should live one's life and not just comment on what one can know or strive to appear to be intelligent (Zizek).

'Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....

Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....

The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.'

Casino Culture:

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time-at least momentarily.
---J.Franzen.