to illustrate a series of linocuts to be published in N.D. Magazine, autumn 2014.
Procrastination by Andrew Santella
“On a road in fourth-century Armenia, the story goes, a Roman centurion met a talking crow. The officer had resolved to convert to Christianity, and now the crow had come to ask him not to do anything rash, to defer his conversion for a day. The centurion, though, would not be put off. “I’ll be a Christian today!” he vowed. Realizing that the crow was, in fact, the devil in avian form arrived to tempt him, the centurion — who would later be venerated as Saint Expeditus, patron of procrastinators — stomped the bird to death.
Some procrastinators blame their habit on perfectionism or fear of failure. The idea is that the “can’t do anything until they know they’ll do it just right. But I suspect that simply having choices is what makes procrastinators of us. In the literature of indecision, no one has dithered as profoundly as Hamlet, the student prince and ancestor to today’s procrastinating undergraduates.” “If the old honor code of familial revenge had been good enough for Hamlet, his response to his” father’s death would have been automatic. But Hamlet was a new kind of existential hero, which means that before he can do his job — killing the king, in his case — he has to agonize over who he is, what he is here for, the meaning of life, the mysteries of eternity. All of this is inconvenient, but it is what makes him one of us. He is undone by his own free will, by his choices.”
? Quoted authors texts © copyright Notre Dame Magazine, 2014
original linoleum cut > linogravure originale > linóleo grabado original > incisione originale > Copyright © Raymond Verdaguer 2015
