I don’t commission writers here. Maybe I should. I don’t ask certain writers to write certain things, preferring them to surprise me with whatever takes their fancy. So far- touch wood- this has paid off and I haven’t had to give a sheepish smile while I try and find a way of rejecting what’s in front of me while sparing the writer in questions feelings.
But anyway, I mention this simply to say that if I did commission people to write things then getting the ever-wonderful
to muse on the topic of idleness would’ve been right at the top of my list. To my editorial mind it just makes sense and the essay that follows vindicates that instinct.Idleness is important, although it is not an easy state to tune into in the world of work we live in. But I would argue that to be able to simply be is just as important (if not more so) than merely running around doing things all the time.
I’ll leave Ana to explain all of this for you. You are in safe hands.
Enjoy.
TJB.
.
These days prior to the summer vacation I am feeling edgy. Any task laid over my usual immense pile of “things that need doing” makes me fly off the handle. But in the in-betweens of being upset, I just feel nothing. The past twelve months have drained me out and I have nothing more to offer, zero fucks left to give. I keep fantasizing about lying in bed for hours on end, or on a towel on a beach, or in a hammock letting the breeze gently rock me to sleep. Any location will do as long as I find myself in one position only, the horizontal one.
This yearning for rest I have has compelled me to do some in depth research on the nature of idleness. What does idleness truly mean? Being quite the sucker I am for words, the origins is where I go to first. Etymologically, “idle” comes from the old German “îtal” meaning empty, useless, vain. With such a provenance one does not wonder that idleness gets such a bad press. If we look in Spanish, we will find “idleness” is translated into “ocio,” which, etymologically, comes from the Latin “otium”, a military concept that expressed free time soliders had without doing anything in between battles “otium otiosum.” The odd twist here is that even if the word “idleness” can have good and bad connotations, the expression “to be idle” is usually equated to “have nothing productive to do,” which is then easily transformed into “being lazy”. When I say odd twist it is because the military term “otium” later became an elite prestigious time for caring for oneself (time for “self-realization”)1. Basically, if you are working-class and idle, you are lazy, if you are rich and idle, you are a philosopher living your best life.
However, I know there must be more to my desire to take a break than all my ill-concluded musings on idleness and the class struggle. Therefore, I have been reading up on the philosophy behind doing nothing from a book that is adequately entitled “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell. I will admit that reading it requires quite a lot of effort from my non-philosophical brain. There is something about American academic writing that is pretentiously hard to read. These people are either intent on making you feel stupid or really keen on you to pay attention to the words. In any case, at some point, the author tells the story of an artist who, for an art project, started to work as an intern for a firm, and people felt unnerved by her. She sat at her desk, just staring into the void or out the window. People started to talk, emails were sent. During the last week of the “internship,” she just rode the elevator up and down incessantly, and when asked, she just answered a change of scenario helped with a change of perspective. The funny thing was the author´s reflection; had the “intern” been online, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., the other employees would probably not have remarked on her. We all waste time at work, but that she was doing Nothing (with a capital N) is what people found unsettling. But it is in this Nothingness where true contemplation takes place, where real ideas can arise. So let’s all pause for a moment and meditate on that. Society finds loafers scary. Considering that most of us dream of doing nothing, and it is in idleness were true inspiration is to be found, I feel this truth should have somehow made it into Alanis Morrisette’s most iconic song.
Leo Tolstoy opened my eyes to an uncomfortable reality in Volume II, Part Four, Chapter One of War and Peace2.
“According to the biblical tradition the absence of work - idleness - was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before his fall. The love of idleness remained the same in fallen man, but the curse still weighs on man, and not only because we must win our bread in the sweat of our face, but because our moral qualities are such that we are unabel to be idle and at peace. A secret voice tells us that we should feel guilty for being idle”.
When reading this I felt like I finally understood the essence of the punishment that befell us after our fall from Grace.
“Darn!” I thought, “This is pure genius.”
If anyone could come up with a most cruel punishment it would be to hate yourself for doing exactly what is in your nature. A punishment so perfect it is truly befitting it should come from the Heavens above.
If I think hard about the moments in life I have felt pure contentedness most of them have involved me doing nothing. For example, in my early twenties, home for the summer break, going to the beach with friends and lying under the parasol, a light breeze caressing my skin, half asleep. Or in my early thirties, sitting on the veranda of my parents’ summer house, eyeing a book half asleep trying to understand once more the paragraph I just read but knowing it is a futile battle, slumber always wins.
I could go on forever with examples, but I have come to the conclusion that right now all these “moments of perfection” have two recurring motifs: being half asleep and “deserving” to be so. I know that the first motif is a reflection of my exhaustion, but it is the latter that I find most problematic. You see, we have been brought up to believe that contentedness and rest are only to be enjoyed after the completion of hard work. In short, to be content, you have to suffer first. But what if we were called to live life in another way? what if, and translating the words of the ever-excellent Sol Aguirre3“Joder, qué bien”, we could finishevery.single.daywith a big smile saying“Damn, today was a great day” and instead of dumping our battered bodies on the bed we still had the energy to read a book without falling asleep mid-paragraph, or share a drink with our partners or person of choice once the children were asleep and chat about non-work related things instead of having to do washloads and laundry folding to only then stumble into bed.
If I am nauseatingly honest with myself I have to admit that the best part of the week these past six months has been Sunday mornings, in a state of half-asleep stupor in which I hear the clatter of bowls and spoons in the kitchen and the opening and closing of the fridge door. In this sweet state of hypnagogia I never fail to congratulate myself on having taught P and CA to make breakfast for themselves and for E. The second-best part of Sundays actually comes in first, tied with the mornings. It is Sunday’s siesta. I have nailed the art of napping, so you can imagine what I think when my offspring are invited to birthday parties somewhere that requires transportation outside of town on a Sunday afternoon from 14:00 to 16:00. Everytime C or I receive such emails or sms we invariably say to each other- “what the fuck! are these people crazy?” Please bring back the whole “Sunday is the day of the Lord” thing. It’s this type of things that make me want to become an ultraorthodox Christian if those things exist. You know, the type that, like ultraorthodox Jews, cannot walk more than a certain number of steps on the Sabbath. But then again, if they do not exist I could totally see myself giving up Christ if it meant I had to take sacrosanct naps of biblical proportions on the Sabbath under the weight of a religious decree.
Another essay I am just starting to read is entitled “Idleness: A Philosophical Essay” by Brian O’Connor. I got it because I read an interview in which the author explained that with this essay he aimed to deconstruct the most famous philosophers’ case against idleness4. One of the philosophers he mentions is Kant. I vaguely remember Kant from my philosophy class back in high school. We had to read the introduction to “Critique of Pure Reason”. I guess the actual critique is so dense that the Spanish Educational Board in the late 1990s decided that reading the intro would suffice for a bunch of 17-year-olds. I kid you not when I tell you that the only thing I remember about Kant is a remarkable anecdote our teacher told us. It seems Kant was of a sickly and weak constitution, but also of a very industrious nature. He never travelled nor exercised. He also had a runny nose, constantly dripping (the epitome of attractiveness)5. Being the resourceful person he was, he placed a handkerchief on a desk that was across the room from the desk he usually sat at to work. This setup meant that, every so often, he had to get up, walk the distance, blow his nose, walk back, and resume his musings and ruminations. This account of Kant’s daily habits raises many questions for me; first and foremost, I want to know how many steps he was truly getting in; was the whole 10000 steps per day a thing back then? Also, did he combine the pacing with some squatting? (that would have been truly beneficial). In any case, I realize that Kant’s approach to his ill health and drive to work was kind of smart. I see myself doing this, too, in my dreams. But in my fantasy, the circumstances are somewhat different. For example, I am not sitting at the desk, I am lying down on a chaise longue. Also, I am not working but listening to music from a 1920s gramophone placed across the sunroom I inhabit surrounded by a forest of kentias. I need to get up to wind up the gramophone and/or change the record. I could, of course, ring a hypothetical bell and ask the butler to do all of that, but even in my dreams I have the need to fight off osteoporosis.
Deserved or not, it has become patently obvious to me that I am in great need of rest. And rest I will. I have analysed the things I could do to slow down and disengage. I started by removing any apps from my smartphone that could “entertain” me away from my purpose of Nothingness. So, no more wandering in Substack Notes or in Google for me. Any email with a link, any message with an embedded YouTube video or Instagram post, I cannot engage with because I uninstalled Safari and Google Chrome. I will not claim that I already feel lighter or more enlightened for that matter. Indeed, since I can no longer google burning questions, 99% of my uncertainties have gone unanswered these past 15 days. I find that I have not imploded because of my self-imposed ignorance, funny that. I have just been reading paperbacks more often, with fewer pauses to check on things I wonder about or see the state of the “likes” on my Substack posts (which is good, since it is invariably stuck somewhere between 20 and 30, so I fail to understand my need to constantly check some shit I already know). I have been also knitting like a nutjob. My knitting endeavours have already produced an idea for another idling post on the nature of manual labour, but I will not delve into that right now; let me catch my breath and read up more on the matter; I promise to keep you posted.
The other thing I am doing is taking a two-month summer break, so when you read this post, I will either be flying back to Spain with three children and a cat (C will join us a week later) or already lounging in my parents’ garden. I have been considerate enough to warn my mother in advance of my intentions to cash in all the “granny time” I have not enjoyed in the past year, so she is fully in charge of keeping my offspring alive for two blessed months.
But I cannot end this post without confessing that my severe restriction on screen time came with a dose of withdrawal symptoms. I have, in the past two weeks, caught myself prying into the screen of the unsuspecting commuters sitting next to me on the train on my way to and from work. My fellow travellers are almost always invariably on Instagram or Amazon checking shit to buy; how singular human nature is in its unoriginality. The only person who surprised me was a young woman who spent the 20 minutes of the train ride checking on Google Maps the driving distance between my city and any European capital. I feel an idea for an anthropology project budding already.
With this I leave you. I'm going to roll up my sleeves and perfect my skills in the art of loafing. I will keep you informed of my progress.
Yours in divine (im)perfection,
Ana (an idler at large)
PS: Since I am doing the thing of ignoring social media, don’t “like” this post, but please, please, please, if you enjoyed it, were entertained or irritated by it, share it. There is a button down there to make the sharing on WhatsApp, SMS, email, or wherever you get your kicks so that other people can be curious and read it, and then also enjoy it, be entertained or irritated. I truly appreciate that small effort on your part.
All this I got from Wikipedia because I myself was short-cutting as the good idler I am becoming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otium
Mine is the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.
Sol Aguirre is a coach and a writer. She has this wonderful newsletter here in Substack, which I read every Saturday. If you are into reading in Spanish, she is funny and inspiring. I leave the link below. She also has a wonderful podcast I enjoy every Monday morning on my commute.
I am paraphrasing a lot here, you can read the interview by clicking on the link https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/idleness-and-society
I wish I could provide proof for any of this, but I just took Don Antonio’s word for this and so should you.
This is classic and so very true: Basically, if you are working-class and idle, you are lazy, if you are rich and idle, you are a philosopher living your best life.
Surely, this is somewhat appropriate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jySfU10IQu4