Incredible, the dream!

Henry: it’s so quiet today, and the sea so blue, and now the garden wall is built ...

Drop everything and leave someone in charge of your mail. Just wrap [Tropic of] Capricorn in a red wool shawl and bring your portable [typewriter] along with you.

I can give you a deep cool room with two windows over the sea, bright rugs on the floor, a desk and some books, an encyclopedia and a dictionary. Bring a woman too with you; that would make it an even keel for the days which come and go silently.

We could sail and bathe in the mornings, have a fine sunny lunch with wine; then a long afternoon siesta; bathe before tea and then four hours work in a slow rich evening.

/Lawrence Durrell (Excerpt from a letter to Henry Miller circa July 1938) (The Durrell- Miller Letters: 1935-1980)

I was turned on to Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) by way of Henry Miller (1891-1980) as I purchased a used copy of The Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935-1980 from Amazon to gain greater intimacy with Miller’s work.

Durrell befriended Miller after expressing admiration for Tropic of Cancer (1931) and that kicked off their relationship. Reading the letters is like a fantasy: two brilliant intellectuals with a sense of humor and mastery of the art of living at their peak exchanging narratives and life observations — cool, dreamy stuff as they no doubt both enjoy getting into it. I don’t recommend reading the letters in any chronological order because I find it more potent to just open the book and read 4 or 5 pages to get a taste — hear the voice — rather than focusing on following a linear chronology.

Durrell is a true master of slow living in my view, in particular the time he lived on the island of Corfu in Greece as well as Cyprus. Durrell wasn’t piss poor but lived cheaply and simply while still fully indulging in sensory pleasure and intellectual stimulation in context of slow living — a role model of sorts! Even more so today because it’s now more of a possibility to drop out.

Bit of a tangent here but people don’t realize and this is a critical contextual point for a better understanding of art history: real estate development did not exist in the sense of what we know today until the late 1970’s and later boomed in the 1980”s due to the introduction of securitization (pooling loans and selling them as income to investors), that innovation started a massive lending industry and began gentrification. So before then, artists in the early 1900’s (Picasso & Modigliani) up to the late 1970’s were able to live with very little money because a lot of areas were run down, neglected or even straight up abandoned (industrial buildings) with no capital or credit even being available for improvements.

In extreme contrast to today, where every inch of land is heavily scrutinized by real estate developers for potential to make money and the profile of a developer is now super-broad from small players (literally one person shops) to hedge funds and institutions.

/MP

Prelude to slow living, turn it up!

I rolled a cigarette and licked the paper.
Then a match in the little house of my hand. The wind was blowing.
I sat on the road at noon,
Thinking and thinking.
So many things have passed, so many things.

/Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) (Insanity - New and Collected Poems: 1931 - 2001)