Fertile Indolence

NIETZSCHE said that a human being is first a camel, then a lion, then a child. For camels, fertile indolence is probably a closed book. Its bearing is on lions and children. In life, this Nietzschean sequence of succession often changes and becomes entangled. A person is already a lion or even a child and then he becomes a camel again, though it seems there are happy people who never have lived through camel periods and perhaps didn’t need them.

An understanding of fertile indolence is probably one of the most important kinds of knowledge for an artist and, if it isn’t given, perhaps one of the most difficult. It must be a continuous, acute consciousness, although even that doesn’t always help; we must be constantly, subconsciously, instinctively vigilant in order not to allow fertile indolence to transform itself into wasteful indolence, which weakens and annuls any project instead of enriching it.

In a camel phase, the most apparently wasteful work, any burden to carry, is better than indolence, because at such a time indolence is pointless and only sinks one deeper into the void. We feel this then and, whether we want to or not, we walk the difficult, joyless path of the camel. But tired and as if steeped or cleansed by our great exertion, we come out of it capable of greater attention, higher temperatures, with deeper sensibility. At this time observation ceases to be merely an act of will or the muscles and so a constraint, and it gradually becomes a reflex, later almost second nature; only then can one speak of fertile indolence, only then is a day of inaction the repose Norwid spoke of, and one returns to work after one’s inactive day enriched, with recharged batteries. A person capable of such indolence is threatened by a kind of fall, a peril: an urge to prolong the state, because it is a happy state. But that happiness of passive contemplation, when it is attained, with time imperceptibly loses its force of vibration, the sharpness of the senses dissolves or loses color. Every attempt at the realization of some project is so fraught with difficulties, so menaced are we by the necessity of passing across a barren field, returning to a camel’s state in which we lose the taste of the original experience which drove us to work, which made us fruitful, that we are tempted to withdraw further and further into passivity. Why torture ourselves when we are happy simply lying in bed and contemplating the shadow of the easel on the ceiling? That capacity for passive happiness brings some artists in the end to an infertile decrepitude of the state that happiness created. Here we are saved only by an inner independence of pleasure as well as pain, the trait or creative element that won’t allow us to rest, though that is what we desire.

This inaction is a dream with open eyes, a state only seemingly restful: the creative instinct is more awake than at any other time, the facultés en éveil, the alert faculties, rolled into a ball, are awake, waiting to throw themselves on the first catch, to leap forward at full speed but also with a full, cold, calculating consciousness.

The artist truly imbued with work and the thought of work makes use of everything. There is no desert, no bleak, impoverished place where he would not find riches for his sensibility. When Gauguin left to paint on Tahiti, Renoir is supposed to have said: “I don’t see why he has to go so far—can’t you paint in Bagnolles?”

The old Delacroix said that after a day of work, a game of cards with the concierge from the building across the street was enough to give him complete happiness. I know this is only one kind of artist, that there were others, like Chateaubriand and Byron, who were tormented by boredom and had to have constantly new and sharp impressions and experiences, which could never satisfy them. They were also great artists—but how much more worthy of emulation and respect do I find the humble Delacroix with his old servant Jenny, old Cézanne immersed in his uninterrupted labor in the remote French provinces.

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