Another night of insomnia, another night of wild imaginings. I slept for about an hour and half, woke, and slept for another hour and a half before I said, “Enough is enough!”
Laundry, as a task, is perhaps the perfect marriage of OCD and ADHD.
The OCD is satisfied by the sorting, by the matching of socks, by getting everything folded just so, and finally put in their proper space.
The ADHD is satisfied by the process: you can’t get bogged down because the task requires you to merely hop in and out of the laundry room; loading and transferring and unloading and folding and hiding away in drawers and closets.
I am in the middle of a collection of short works by Thomas Mann, a German writer active from the late 1800’s. This collection begins with a short story from 1897 and ends with a piece acknowledged as the pinnacle of his achievement, written in 1912. He continued to write after this for decades, but was apparently never again quite satisfied with his output. I have yet to reach this piece, being forced to pause a moment to acknowledge certain thoughts corresponding to what I have already read.
You might notice the alteration to my elocution – an alteration which is entirely in sympathy with the works to which I have so recently been exposed. A certain stilted formality, perhaps. Further reading of this piece might render transparent a definite and nearly inflexible morality.
These are hallmarks of Mann’s writing, at least at this stage of his career.
He is a powerful writer, gripping in spite of the austere subject matter, the overbearing morality, the lack of plot in deference to basic character study.
These facts of Mann’s writing begin to inform opinions, thoughts on possible social and moral lines connecting the world in which Mann wrote to that in which Durrenmatt wrote some 50 years later. You may recall, or may wish to revisit or even visit for the first time, what I wrote on Durrenmatt some three months ago.
Granted that Mann was German and Durrenmatt was Swiss, there are definite sympathies in style, in tone, and even in subtext. I look forward to reaching the “grand piece” of Mann’s collection; it should prove informative and perhaps conclusive on the subject of those potential sympathies. I suspect that I will have more to say on the subject at such time as I am able to complete my perusal of this current collection.