Via A Piece of Monologue: Thomas Bernhard, from his autobiography, Gathering Evidence:

For long periods I live in isolation, isolated both in mind and in body … Subject to every vagary of my own nature and of the universe — whatever it is — I can get through life only with the help of a precise daily routine. I am able to exist only by dint of standing up to myself — in fact, of consistently opposing myself. When I am writing I read nothing, and when I am reading I write nothing. For long periods I read and write nothing, finding both equally repugnant.

And:

There are long periods when I detest both reading and writing, and then I fall prey to inactivity, which means brooding obsessively on my extremely personal plight, both as an object of curiosity and as a confirmation of everything I am today, of what I have become over the years in circumstances which are as routine as they are unnatural, artificial, and indeed perverse.

Dear pen pals. I and this cup of coffee wish to express our egrets, our profoundest ibises, our most heartfelt cranes and herons, that we haven’t written you in a while, and that what little we have written lately has been such weak tea, so quotationy, so tersely photographic, so sphinxlike in the detail department, so bone-dry and dispassionate and chalked thick with boredom-dust since sometime before the snows let up. The cup of coffee points out that, here nearly at the year’s midpoint, freshly post-solstice, I have posted fifty-one times on erasing.org in 2011 so far. That, opines the cup, is some truly woebegone shit. If god forbid I were a Gawker Media blogger I’d be required to post that many times daily before my noontime lunch-pellet, lest I be cast out into the street and trampled into pageview-paste by berzerk Dentonian ad-weasels on the hunt for ambrosial clicky-cash. The cup of coffee is now just an empty cup; its former occupant is sloshing around somewhere down behind this here bellybutton, its shade-grown caffeine hell-bent for the nearest adenosine receptors while a god damn Iguazu Falls of gland-washed epinephrine thunders down around them. I feel embarrassed to be counting posts and lamenting some stupid uptick in blog silence, the who-cares arias just write themselves by sheer reflex and then perform themselves to ferocious self-encores; and anyway lest we forget blogs are dead, unbelievably dead, shockingly dead, they’ve been dead for years, were dead in the very eggshell, and are now deader than ever, uncountable levels below the deadest of all previous known deadnesses, their mangled remains exquisitely profaned, their ashes eaten and excreted without surcease, their blackened and salted graves smugly macarena’d upon by the grand mal avenging angels of social media triumphant. It is ever thus. We and our pronouns miss you nonetheless, pen pals; we miss this nighttime skywriting, these one-way wall-taps, this unlooked-for pouring-out of letters and their pet punctuations; and I speak for myself and the wearily empty coffee cup and its inky-black ex-contents when I say I wish we spoke more, I wish we said more, I feel ever more egretfully (most bitternly, most storkly) the wading waning of connection between me and you and memory and English and weather and all the figures of fascination that creep across our pages and screens and all the passing hours those figures hasten or slow. Would we could improve.

“Remember when I used to write about reading books?” “No.” “Yeah, me neither.”

Martin Amis, The Information:

For an hour (it was the new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled … In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconceived.

Lately reading Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby & Co., written in the form of a narrator’s diaristic notes — “a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text” — on a subject of growing interest to me: writers who do not write. Whose attitude toward writing is that of Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener: they would prefer not to. “We all know the Bartlebys,” writes the narrator, “they are beings inhabited by a profound denial of the world.” Some of these writers write for a while and then stop. Some choose to stop writing; others simply cannot continue. Some never write at all. Some attempt to provide reasons for not writing, and some don’t bother. Suicides don’t count, the narrator stipulates, though he allows a few exceptions. Most of the writers he includes are real (Salinger, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Joubert); a few aren’t. He refers to these writers’ works, and their lack of works, as the literature of the No.

Oh, I don’t know how important it is that I say this or something else. Saying is inventing. Be it false or certain. We invent nothing, we think we are inventing when in fact all we are doing is stammering out the lesson, the remains of some homework learnt and forgotten, life without tears, just as we weep over it. And to hell with it.

My border-crossing Amazon.com order of five weeks ago evidently gets lost in the mail and so they kindly send me a replacement order, expedited shipping, at no extra charge. (Actually they end up over-refunding me five dollars.) Among the books I’ve ordered is The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. From Paul Auster’s introduction:

Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for more than forty years … a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book. Joubert speaks in whispers, and one must draw very close to him to hear what he is saying.

The book opens with this notebook entry of Joubert’s, tentatively dated 1783:

The only way to have friends is to throw everything out the window, to keep your door unlocked, and never to know where you will be sleeping at night.

Unseasonably warm day. This afternoon I walk down to the library and retrieve Gide’s Amyntas from the shelf (returned weeks ago, finally finished) in order to copy down the following passage, which has sort of stuck with me, a serviceably noble-sounding apologia of sorts for unprolificness, writer’s block, laziness, etc.:

… that’s how the finest roses are produced — only from rosebushes subject to the winter’s stupor. On this African earth, so rich and so warm, the tininess of these flowers, which astonishes us at first, their narrowness, the strangulation of their beauty, is the consequence of the fact that the plant never stops blooming. Each blossom opens without energy, without premeditation, without expectation …

In the same way, the most admirable human efflorescence requires a previous torpor. The unconscious gestation of great works plunges the artist into a sort of stupor; and not to consent to this process, to fear it, to try to regain control too soon, to be ashamed of one’s winters, that is what — in one’s greed for more — will strangle and thwart each blossom.