The Art of Doing Nothing

Today it's the kind of hot where, if you have AC, its not worth the trouble to leave it. I've done very little today and felt pretty guilty about it, too. That is until about an hour ago when I thought it might be worth practicing the art of doing nothing. These passages from The Great Gatsby were coming to mind, the ones that capture the ennui and the heat of that hot Long Island summer. Daisy and Jordan practically melting into the furniture, for example:


The only completely stationery object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor(12).

Or later in the summer when the heat makes them crazy enough to drive into the city and cram up in the Plaza Hotel for an afternoon. Now this is the kind of heat I'm talking about, when a breeze is only slightly more refreshing than exhaust:

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep." Each of us said over and over that it was a crazy idea - we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny...

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us fixing her hair.

"It's a swell suite," whispered Jordan respectfully and everyone laughed.

"Open another window," commanded Daisy, without turning around.

"There aren't anymore."

"Well, we'd better telephone for an axe --" (133).

So in lieu of a breeze, I've found this great mint-flavored sparkling water at Whole Foods. Brings the temp down a few degrees. Here's to Gatsby and to doing as a little as possible on this hot Sunday afternoon...