Sunday Mornings

1.
The paramount thing is to put off breakfast as long as you can. Avoiding dressing or bathing helps, but you really can't begin working until you've had your breakfast. To cultivate the leisurely Sunday morning, then, you place that breakfast at some indefinite point in the future.

Present involvements and pertinent thoughts are batted away.

Five books to read for five pages each, and then a drift through their illustrations. One side of a record of classical music, to ignore. Any inconsiderable bodily motions--sheet-kicking, pillow-building, and eye-rubbing. A look at the wondering dial of sunbeams through the room. Overall, put-on notions of seriousness are essayed and quickly abandoned. It's a style to enable writing of precisely the present sort: a chain of single half-fogged propositions conveyed by the sentence fragment.

2.
The author, having spent some years refining this practice, decides that it has been perfected, and must now be made to dwindle away. Instead of budgeting to spend a fourteenth of her waking time entirely absent of contemptible cares, she seeks to wholly assume a better, more engrossing class of concerns. Her customary miserliness demands a value for the valueless time she has spent, and she constructs one accordingly: a working understanding of everyone's leisure, of everyone's in-between time, of everyone's unchronicled time as a body-in-bed. Not as a thinker, nor a lover, but as a slow volputuary.

She can then emerge with her half-thoughts, with native intelligence to sell.