(Roughly) Daily

Data storyteller RJ Andrews demonstrates…

How do creatives – composers, painters, writers, scientists, philosophers – find the time to produce their opus?

Each routine day is represented as a continuous 24 hour cycle. Midnight is placed at 12 o’clock position and noon at 6 o’clock. Colors mark major categories of activity including work, sleep, and exercise…

The daily rituals of great creators: “Creative Routines,” from @infowetrust.

* Mason Curry, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (the source of much of the data that informed the gaphics above)

###

As we contemplate cultivating customs, we might send learned birthday greetings to Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, better known simply as Erasmus; he was born on this date in 1466.  A Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, translator, and theologian, probably best remembered for his book In Praise of Folly, he was the greatest scholar of the northern Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament (“Do unto others…”), and an important figure in patristics and classical literature. 

Erasmus had contrasting experiences of routine: on being orphaned, Erasmus was sent to a series of monastic or semi-monastic schools, which he despised both for their discipline and for their disdain of inquiry. Graduating with few prospects, he joined an Augustinian monastery where he considered his superiors “barbarians” discouraging his classical studies. On ordination, he escaped– and began a career that began in struggle (as he balanced the demands of study with those of serving as a Clerk, and Priest, a tutor… all while trying to distinguish himself as a poet.

His luck changed in 1499, when he connected with a reformist English circle (notably John Colet and Thomas More), then with radical French Franciscan Jean Vitrier, and later with the Aldine New Academy in Venice… which led, in the Reformation, to his emergence as a prime influencer of European thought. Among fellow scholars and philosophers of that era he was– and is still– known as the “Prince of the Humanists.”

Erasmus’ views were contentious on his time and elicited a good bit of criticism. While we don’t know too much about his daily routine, we do know that for the last half of his life it included enough time on a regular basis to read these attacks and to prepare and publish apologetic works in his own defense, in many cases leading to a long series of back-and-forth polemical books… kind of like Twitter feud, but at the speed of Gutenberg.

Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1523) by Hans Holbein the Younger

source