No. 47: the long afternoon
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Cadence
No. 47 · Spring
The long afternoon
An essay about attention, and a recipe for braised onions.
There is a kind of afternoon late April sometimes delivers, somewhere between one thing and the next, where nothing is being waited for and nothing is being decided. You have had it. A neighbour is doing something to a hedge. The light is low and long, and you are not sure how much of what came before it you would be able to describe.
What I have been turning over is why those hours survive at all. The days built around a plan tend to compress into the plan. The unplanned ones keep their furniture: the hedge, the light, the particular quality of having nowhere to be.
Four in the morning, which is the same problem from the other end.
The obvious explanation is that memory keeps what it cannot file. A morning spent on a task is filed under the task. An afternoon spent on nothing has no folder, so it stays out on the desk where you keep noticing it.
What we remember is rarely what was important. It is what was unaccounted for.
From the notebook, 3 April
Which is an argument for doing less on a Sunday, and a poor one, because an afternoon you have set aside to be unaccounted for is accounted for. The hedge has to be a surprise. I have no method to offer here, only the observation that the years I remember in any detail are the ones I organised least.
Also this week
The physics of stillness
A short note on why sitting still is harder than it looks, and what rowers know about it.
From the kitchen
A recipe for braised onions
Patience, butter, and about ninety minutes you were not going to use for anything else.
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