Caterina.net: From another one of my weird encyclopedias

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{ Friday, July 11, 2003 }

From another one of my weird encyclopedias

This one, from the Encyclopedia Acephalica (and this definition, in particular, from Michel Leiris):

Pensum. Most forms of activity impose themselves on man as pensums, even in the case of activities he appears to have chosen freely. Few painters produce pictures other than by way of pensums, works imposed on them by an alien, and often hateful, hand. How many writers harness themselves to their novel and voluntarily reduce themselves to the rank of plough-horses, or asses, loaded, now with cereals, now with relics. How many people, likewise, enjoy themselves but in order to perform a species of a rite...

Everything is hateful when it is done as a pensum. All white-men are failures, for not one of them (or as near as may be not one of them) is really capable of enjoying himself. Leaving aside children who set fire to haystacks, derail trains or dream up great massacres of animals, I know scarcely any but sinister pedants who, chewing on their pen holders, sweat blood and water so as to write out to the bitter end their calamitous pensums...

There is an endnote to this passage which reads: "Pensum, according to the OED: "A charge, duty or allotted task; a school-task or lesson to be prepared; also (U.S.) a lesson or piece of work imposed as a punishment, a school 'imposition'.

LINK | 3:19 AM | TB

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{ COMMENTS }

A pensum and then some!

Jim | July 11, 2003 10:59 AM

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A certain truth. To write is to anesthesize, to a degree. It's not necessarily a punishment, but it's a task that for some of us, must be done, maybe not out of hate, but almost always out of heaviness. If writing is a pensum, then it's the schoolboy's or schoolgirl's letters on the chalkboard, saying something that they've been made to write out, not by anyone in particular, but by the self-imposed consciousness and duty of relief.

PS | July 11, 2003 11:17 AM

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"Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept." --Molloy (Beckett)

Steven | July 13, 2003 7:59 PM

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