Wasting time

I think that wasting time is the only way to find it later, when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but you keep looking out the window at the street sweeper on Luis Calvo Street, who fights the fall with the dedication of someone who doesn’t. … He is in a hurry to return home: there are men who live like this. And they are very quiet. And very rare. I am fascinated by this man because I see in his miserliness a mystery to be solved, a conspiracy without a crime, perhaps a mystery. I’m no longer interested in people who are in a hurry, but where do the slow people go? I imagine, sometimes, that he would finish his shift and sit down to write the passages he had been thinking about all afternoon, clinging to his task, happy to go with his head free and his hands busy (I don’t know when we accepted the opposite as a sign of progress). Meanwhile, at the window, I am thinking of an idea with scattered and perhaps impossible limits, as all ideas are in their infancy; Excessive, vaporous, weightless. And I think: I should watch “Patterson” again. And then: Maybe the sweeper is a movie buff, or a botanist, or maybe he’s just tired and that’s why… What if nothing happens to him? What if he’s not hiding anything?

Today wasting time has a terrible status, close to rentierism. We see someone who’s in no hurry in Madrid and we think he’s an heir (that’s the most beautiful profession in the world) or a tax evader or a terrible exploiter who underpays a few people to enjoy the morning off: it makes you want to arrest them, frankly.

– Sorry, sir, but you can’t live life that way, and even less in the capital.

I don’t know if people are in a hurry or pretend to be in a hurry, but I notice that this agitation that was once limited to Wall Street stockbrokers, campaigning politicians, and drug dealers has now become democratized, and now reaches the lowest and most basic positions, just like full-time jobs and cell phones. Roaming now seems like a bigger luxury than facial massage, now that it’s cheaper, and the same thing happens with roaming. And I am not exaggerating: there are wealthy people who pay money for a digital retirement, and perhaps they dream that there, away from everything, there is an artificial intelligence that will write the story of their lives sooner and better than any other human being.

David Lynch told in “Catch the Goldfish” everything he had to do before starting to paint the picture: prepare the materials, the frame… “If you know that in half an hour you will have to be somewhere else, there is no way to make it happen. (…) An artistic life means having time for good things to happen. In other words: to lose it and find it by chance, perhaps at the bottom of a glass of wine, or at the end of an aimless walk, among dry autumn leaves that suddenly fall like parts of the world we do not understand. And so, I think, he ends up writing: “This music came to me, floating on the waters.” Eliot stole it from Shakespeare.

Don’t worry: I don’t know what we’re doing here either.

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