If writing is your vocation, get another vocation. If it is to write that you desire, then desire another desire. Get a job, work, lest you disappear into the worklessness to which writing is bound. I do not like empty, open days. To be alone with writing. What, then, do I do? Write? No: I write of the impossibility of writing, like a wheel which spins in the air. What you need is friction: the contact with the world which would allow you to think you move forward. This is why I am happy to have a ‘real’ job, and that that job is mundane (administration, meetings, form-filling).
Mundane work: it belongs to the world, to the security and solidity of the world. Kafka in the Worker’s Insurance Company: he had a short working day, home for lunch by two o’clock. Janouch reports Kafka took up carpentry. Good, honest labour which filled his afternoon. It was only insomnia which allowed him to write. Permitted him at the same stroke that it severed him from everyone around him. Gave him the dream of writing even as it woke him from those nights of sleep which would have been him rest sufficient to work. Blanchot: ‘Writer: daytime insomniac’: yes, because to write is to be awoken from that daytime slumber which is work. (This, by the way, is the real meaning of the ‘primal scene’ of The Writing of the Disaster: it is a story of the writer who without words (infans) turns from work to the sky in which only being and nothingness turn and unfurl.)
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