Postmen like doctors go from house to house

"The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring."

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), trans, Ralph Parker. (St. Ives: Clays Ltd, 2000), p36.

I'm currently making my way through the above book, which is proving to be a surprisingly pleasant read. Solzhenitsyn's short novel is (so far) a very human portrayal of extreme stoicism, and of defiant resourcefulness in the face of brutal authoritarianism.

The above quotation is a great reminder of how systems define the conditions of the lives within them. It immediately made think of Virginia Woolf's superb essay, A Room of One's Own, where she set out to argue that, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction;" the system which they inhabit is one that is so stacked against them that they need a space outside of it in order to be write. Systems have a knack of moulding individuals into a particular way of doing and thinking, be they political dictatorship or patriarchy, and it takes a great effort to be able to break free from this ideological domination.

You can see this at a mundane, possibly bathetic level, in how people often react to full time work. Their employment results in an incredible drain on their time and energies, leaving them to spend their free time outside of work either recovering from their physical and mental exertions or attempting to forget about them. In this respect the free time isn't free at all. The solution to this problem is to either work less, or take a great effort and break free from the mind forged manacles.

I've just stumbled across the poem 'Aubade' by Philip Larkin whilst trying to find my copy of Woolf's text, and the first stanza really encapsulates these feelings. The speaker is able to look at his life from a critical distance only at 4am, a time that belongs neither to his working hours, nor to those hours where he tries to forget about them. I think I may need to start waking up earlier, in the soundless dark, in order to get back onto the creative writing trail.

"I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify."

 Larkin, Philip. 'Aubade' (1977), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After, Volume F, ed. Stephen Greenblatt. (USA, 2006), p.2573.