That was Thoreau's "Good Genius," as personified in Walden, an important experiment with a slightly more complicated relationship to the concept of routine than I'd like to delve into here. Rather, this time out, I'll merely be presenting various ideas that have arisen out of the technique of routine. With that in mind, take what you will from the above passage... as you can see, there's plenty to take.- Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day, - farther and wider, - and rest thee by man brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and night overtake thee every where at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers' crops? that is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and shed. Let not to get a living by thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
From the transcendentalism of Thoreau, we'll move across the spectrum to the debauchery of Charles Bukowski, "laureate of American lowlife" (Time). Consider the following two passages from Factotum - his depiction vérité of the living nightmare of capitalist survival - as a one-two punch (and Buk did enjoy the fighting arts); while light on actual description of routine (essentially, candy bars and booze), they thoughtfully hammer down some of the main ideas of the Bukowski ouevre:
That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.While that selection nods to my last post (on Miller), the following serves as a reminder that a routine, like a temporary autonomous zone, need not last a duration of more than a few days.
When I got back to Los Angeles I found a cheap hotel just off Hoover Street and stayed in bed and drank. I drank for some time, three or four days. I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.Again, talk what ideas from these you will.
And finally, in the middle of the spectrum (or off it completely), we find outré filmmaker/artist/musician/transcendental meditator David Lynch. And here is perhaps one of the best examples of routine in the service of idea generation that I can imagine:
I like things to be orderly. For seven years I ate at Bob's Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee--with lots of sugar. And there's lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It's a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob's.Every day! For seven years!
