Live twice

Jane Austen (1775–1817) Austen never lived alone and had little expectation of solitude in her daily life. Her final home, a cottage in the village of Chawton, England, was no exception: she lived there with her mother, her sister, a close friend, and three servants, and there was a steady stream of visitors, often unannounced. ... Austen wrote in the family sitting room, “subject to all kinds of casual interruptions,” her nephew recalled. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming. “Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton & doses of rhubarb.” From Daily rituals by Mason Currey #dailyrituals #inktober #janeAusten @masoncurrey

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) By the 1950s, too much work on too little sleep—with too much wine and cigarettes—had left Sartre exhausted and on the verge of collapse. Rather than slow down, however, he turned to Corydrane, a mix of amphetamine and aspirin then fashionable among Parisian students, intellectuals, and artists (and legal in France until 1971, when it was declared toxic and taken off the market). The prescribed dose was one or two tablets in the morning and at noon. Sartre took twenty a day, beginning with his morning coffee and slowly chewing one pill after another as he worked. For each tablet, he could produce a page or two of his second major philosophical work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason. The biographer Annie Cohen-Solal reports, “His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol—wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on—two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.” - From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey #dailyrituals #inktober #jeanPaulSartre @masoncurrey

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) “My life has been regulated by insomnia,” Bourgeois told an interviewer in 1993. “It’s something that I have never been able to understand, but I accept it.” Bourgeois learned to use these sleepless hours productively, propped up in bed with her “drawing diary,” listening to music or the hum of traffic on the streets. “Each day is new, so each drawing—with words written on the back—lets me know how I’m doing,” she said. “I now have 110 drawing-diary pages, but I’ll probably destroy some. - From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey “I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands...” ― Louise Bourgeois “Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” ― Louise Bourgeois #dailyrituals #inktober #LouiseBourgeois @masoncurrey