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Do you know who said it, what's written on the page in my journal? No. Stop, don't you dare Google it. I know you might have Googled, if so, then you already knew before I added his signature below.
If you don't know, what would you guess is her or his profession? Did you think it was a visual artist? Think about that while I tell you what I've been doing.
In the evening after supper I am reading my way through a collection of short stories I picked up on the free book table in the hall at work, starting with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown and ending with Louise Erdrich's The Red Convertible. Close together this week I read Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat and Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener - both tales about scribes early in the 19th century who live poor and plain, the first in Russia and the second in America. Can there be anything more mundane and boring than copying text scrupulously and painstakingly by hand, all day, every day, six days a week? Then having to read it through with another copyist to be certain there are no errors? The writing they copy would most likely be tedious "legalize" too. Next time you curse your computer, think about the alternative. Well, my friend Inge might prefer it.
But put these ordinary characters Akakievich and Bartleby, whose lives are as achingly banal as anyone can imagine, into the hand held pens of Gogol and Melville, and their circumstances become rich alleyways you can't resist following around the next corner.
Unless you're Paris Hilton, life is pretty mundane most of the time, with blips of interest, joy, surprise or disappointment now and then. Writing, photographing, drawing, painting, exploring, teaching, counseling, parenting, cooking, designing, cleaning, laundering, organizing -- or whatever way of knowing you bring to the world -- you can be blown away by the essence of something inside your ordinary routine once in a while. I dare you.
Ok, who said it: "You need to let little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you." If you know, please let others guess first. Is there anything more ordinary than a Campbell's soup can?
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