because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in
its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn’t sway toward the
thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like if it were
still a play of appetites and inclinations rather than a roster of the
duties and oughts that fill our calendar—indeed, make it necessary
that we keep a calendar at all? Encumbered because the word has never
not carried the taint of its associations. Idle hands, the idle rich,
the downturns that idle workers. Idleness has been branded the obverse
of industry, a slap in the face to all healthy ambition. So-and-so is
a layabout, a ne’er-do-well, an idler. But for all that, we have not
made the word unbeautiful; there is a light at the core, to be
remarked, gleaned from the righteous attributions of the anxiously
busy.
It is a confusing concept, though, and to find that pure and valid
strain, it would help to say what it is not. Idleness is not
inertness, for example. Inertness is immobile, inattentive, somehow
lacking potential. Neither is idleness quite laziness, for it does not
convey disinclination. It is not torpor, or acedia—the so-called Demon
of Noontide—nor is it any form of passive resistance, for these
require an engagement of the will, and idleness is manifestly not
about that. Gandhi was not promulgating idleness, nor was Bartleby the
scrivener exhibiting it when he owned that he would “prefer not to.”
Nor are we talking about the purged consciousness that Zen would
aspire to, or any spiritually influenced condition: idleness is not
prayer, meditation, or contemplation, though it may carry tonal
shadings of some of these states.
It is the soul’s first habitat, the original self
ambushed—cross-sectioned—in its state of nature, before it has been
stirred to make a plan, to direct itself toward something. We open our
eyes in the morning and for an instant—more if we indulge ourselves—we
are completely idle, ourselves. And then we launch toward purpose; and
once we get under way, many of us have little truck with that first
unmustered self, unless in occasional dreamy asides as we look away
from our tasks, let the mind slip from its rails to indulge a reverie
or a memory. All such thoughts to the past, to childhood, are a
truancy from productivity. But there is an undeniable pull at times,
as if to a truth neglected. William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” suggests as much: “But for those first affections,/Those
shadowy recollections,/Which, be they what they may,/Are yet the
fountain light of all our day,/Are yet a master light of all our
seeing.”
Idleness is what supervenes on those too few occasions when we allow
our pace to slacken and merge with the rhythms of the natural day,
when we manage to thwart the impulse to plan forward to the next thing
and instead look—idly, with nascent curiosity—at what is immediately
in front of us. It has been with us from the first man and woman—when
self was in accord with all nature—and so along with being the core of
our childhood sense of the world, it is also the center of our Western
legend of creation. Unsurprisingly, it features—the longing, the
evocation—through our literature and art from earliest times, changing
inflection, intensifying and diminishing depending on historical
context. Figuring conspicuously in the pastoral ideal and in the
atmospherics of mythologies, the notion has over time taken on dense
crosshatchings, in recent centuries at points almost suggesting an
epistemology, the basis for a way of true seeing. But it remains a
concept-rejecting word. Put too much of any kind of freight on it and
its dolce far niente vanishes.
Eden was idleness’ first home, where the well-rested being had
nothing to do but open its eyes and behold—until, alas, appetite
became ambition and Eden wasn’t. But its echo reverberated throughout
the classical tradition, in pastoral, the Idylls of Theocritus in the
third century bc (the connection between “idle” and “idyll” is
phonetic, not etymological); renditions of rural agricultural life in
Virgil, his Eclogues; in the myth-suffused transformation tales of
Ovid. Indeed, it might be said that any literature or art that treats
of the pantheon has to do with idleness, for the gods, by definition,
in their essence, were uncorrupted by human sorts of striving, and
though full of schemes and initiatives, their rhythms were paradisal,
eternal, profoundly idle. Walter Benjamin quotes from Friedrich
Schlegel’s “An Idyll of Idleness” thus: “Hercules…labored too…But the
goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that
reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the
inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind
into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or
not.”
There is a long-standing connection, a harmony, between literary
expressions of idleness and the invocation of the gods, and the lesser
rural deities, such as populate the Eclogues. Milton’s “Lycidas”
(1637), a pastoral elegy, draws directly on the Virgilian model. The
poet’s lament for his deceased friend reimagines a former happy rural
leisure—the shepherd in his idleness—complete with “oaten flute” and
“rough satyrs” dancing, before the gods see fit to steal it away. We
find a similar conflation of the bosky world of the pagan gods and the
more leisurely disposition of impulses and affections in Shakespearean
comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, where
customary strivings are overtaken by an almost antic lightness of
being.
But myths and rural pastorals are by no means the only expression we
find. Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1580), that cataract of shrewd
humane psychologizing—and now the source text for a vast, fertile
genre—could be said to have taken its origin in this selfsame
condition. Montaigne, who liked to see things not only both ways, but
all ways, in his small early essay “Of Idleness,” first deplores it,
writing of the mind that, “If it be not occupied with a certain
subject that will keep it in check and under restraint…will cast
itself aimlessly hither and thither into the vague field of
imaginations.” But then, a few sentences later, reflecting on his
decision to retire from the endeavors of the world, he reverses, says,
“It seemed to me that I could do my mind no greater favor than to
allow it, in idleness, to entertain itself.” He goes on to say how, in
that freedom, mind “brings forth so many chimeras and fantastic
monsters, the one on top of the other…that in order to contemplate at
my leisure their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to set them
down in writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of them.” And so
from one man’s idleness is begotten one of the treasures of world
literature.
In Montaigne the word clearly equates to imaginative fecundity, though
of course we need to remember that for this writer idleness meant a
removal from the orthogonal demands of civic life, not any slackening
in the exertion of his energies. This needs to be underscored: that
idleness does not mark a cessation of the expenditure of energies,
only of its more outwardly purposeful application. The rambling,
associating shape of the Essays is a testament to this.
A kindred repurposing of energies issued in the momentous surge that
was European romanticism. The idealism it espoused, the assumption of
a deep and creative bond with nature and the elevation of the uniquely
individual over the mechanized and standardized, made it hospitable to
the deeper ethos of idleness. Which is to say: to the rhythms and
expressions of life unfettered. Witness the poetry in England of
Wordsworth, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and John Keats, or that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis in
Germany. Is there a purer, more lyrically nuanced expression of this
languor of being than Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” though here idleness has
shifted from a state of possibility to one of almost dazed
fulfillment? The poet invokes the season personified:
Who hath not seen thee oft amidst thy store? Sometimes whoever
seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy
hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind
The gourds are swelling, the bees are buzzing: the note will echo
back, many years later, as W. B. Yeats announces in “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree”:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build
there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have
there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud
glade.
The term, it seems, is always in implicit contrast to its
opposite—industry—whereas the reverse is not necessarily true. We
think of industry, and our thoughts don’t run naturally toward
idleness. The basic play of opposites is at work in the writings of
the romantics, who were not only for organic individuality, but were
also manifestly against—against the “dark satanic mills,” among other
things. We pick up a kindred sense of struggle if we look to the
United States in the nineteenth century, where the contest of contrary
energies was working itself out on a still-great tabula rasa. There is
the irrepressible vector of growth, expansion, conquest—industry and
trade—and then the counter-thrust, the spiritual and poetic embrace of
so much possibility, so much undomesticated terrain. Our unique
contrarians had their say. Washington Irving set his Rip Van Winkle
dreaming a life away in the mood-drenched Catskill mountains. Walt
Whitman, anarchic celebrant, invited his soul to “loaf.” Henry David
Thoreau, who remains the most visible spokesperson for doing nothing,
provided that it is the right kind of nothing, took to the woods to
“front only the essential facts,” an action which had everything to do
with awareness and self-attainment and rejected conventionally gainful
initiative. Indeed, much of Thoreau’s work can be read as a kind of
apologia for attuned idleness. In his well-known essay “Walking,” for
instance, he creates a kind of objective correlative in the activity
of walking, which he equates to “sauntering,” a word which he explains
is “beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country,
in the Middle Ages, and asked charity’…Some, however, would derive the
word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the
good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home
everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.” A covert
metaphysics lurks, a linking of the unfettered state to more profound
outcomes and insights.
Emerson—indeed, the whole Transcendentalist movement, fixed as it is
on interiority—is in essential accord, though in his journals of 1840
we find him playing a puckish reverse of Montaigne’s assertion,
writing, “I have been writing with some pains essays on various
matters as a sort of apology to my country for my apparent idleness.”
But there is a wink in the sentence, a droll delineation of outer from
inner in that word “apparent.”
These nineteenth-century American thinkers and writers, by and large
opposed to the commerce-driven expansionist spirit of the day, were
not only deeply bound up with a deeper reading of nature, but also
gave heed to the spirit we find in the work of the soulful Chinese
wandering poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, or the Japanese Buddhist priest
Yoshida Kenkō, whose Essays in Idleness,dating from the early
fourteenth century, reflect on the immersed intensity of life lived
apart from public agitations: “What a strange, demented feeling it
gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone,
with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical
thoughts have entered my head.” Eastern religions, which have long
pledged receptivity over initiative, also found ready adherence in the
United States. The same idle posture that right-thinking Protestants
everywhere deplored was seen by the Transcendentalists as evidence of
a philosophical and spiritual openness.
At more or less the same time, in Europe, a very different expression
of this temper, this disposition, was manifesting itself. The madly
expanding urban centers, Paris especially, began to spawn their own
contrary figures, those who proclaimed a deliberate resistance to
proÂgress of the sort represented by Baron Haussmann’s massive
architectural program, which was bent on imposing order upon the
metropolis. Set against the mentality of progress was the flâneur,
who, as characterized and celebrated by Charles Baudelaire, esteemed
the useless, the gratuitous, anything that would serve to mock the
ends-driven compulsion of the age.
“To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere,” he wrote in
his essay on artist Constantin Guys, “to see the world, to be at the
very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are
some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and
impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic
definitions.” The flâneur, the urban saunterer, advertised the value
of leisure and enacted the implicit protest of tarrying. Schlegel
might have had such a figure in mind when he wrote, “And in all parts
of the world, it is the right to idleness that distinguishes the
superior from the inferior classes.” Time is money, money is time, and
the apotheosis of having is doing nothing at all.
Through the figure of the flâneur—via the writing of critic and
philosopher Walter Benjamin—the idle state was given a platform,
elevated from a species of indolence to something more like a
cognitive stance, an ethos. Benjamin’s idea is basically that the true
picture of things—certainly of urban experience—is perhaps best
gathered from diverse, often seemingly tangential, perceptions, and
that the dutiful, linear-thinking rationalist is less able to fathom
the immensely complex reality around him than the untethered flâneur,
who may very well take it by ambush.
A related but psychologically more complex aesthetics of indirection
is found in Marcel Proust, who, as author of the monstrous and
breathtakingly intricate In Search of Lost Time, cannot himself be
tagged as an idler, but who is nonetheless a pantheon figure in any
deeper discussion of the topic. For it was Proust, drawing on the
philosophy of Henri Bergson, who proposed so-called involuntary memory
as the source of all deeper artistic connectedness, as opposed to that
which any of us can retrieve upon command. “The past is hidden
somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some
material object…which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it
depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves
must die.” No willing one’s way to the truth. One can only make
oneself receptive and hope. Which is to say, and not all that
roundaboutly, that the inactive, receptive posture is likely to have a
better purchase on what ultimately matters than concerted activity.
Proust also supplies another important link, that between idleness and
reading, idleness and creative reverie. Thus far we have tended to
think of the word in its obvious opposition to industry, and this as
manifesting physical inaction. But of course there are the inward
aspects as well. Consider daydreaming, so often deemed purposeless, a
kind of mental laying about, even though there is testimony abounding
from artists, composers, and authors claiming it as the very seedbed
of their inspiration. In the “Combray” section of Lost Time, the
narrator gives an extended recounting of his experience of childhood
reading. He fuses the ostensibly directional, subject-oriented aspects
of the task with the atmospheres of indolence, the sensuous inner
dilations that accompany it. Recalling how he would secrete himself in
what he calls a “sentry box” in the garden, he asks of his thoughts,
“Did not they form a similar sort of hiding hole in the depths of
which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I
was looking at what went on outside?” How familiar is this feeling,
this impulse to hide the self away when reading, both because hiding
not only intensifies the focus, but keeps the reader out of the
sightlines of those who anoint themselves the guardians and
legislators of our moral well-being.
For all its openness to profundity and creative insight, maybe
precisely because of that, idleness is deemed objectionable. Creative
insight is so often an implicit questioning of the rationales of the
status quo. Idleness wills nothing, espouses no agenda of progress; it
proposes the sufficiency of what is. And our aforementioned guardians
find this intolerable, a defiant vote against their idea of what
should be. Will is the defining term. Will is the reason why Bartleby
the scrivener—a figure who out-Kafkas Kafka, out-Becketts
Beckett—cannot be annexed to the idler’s ranks: his immobility is a
concerted refusal, the opposite of idleness, which is neither
concerted nor refusing. He reminds us that idleness is primarily a
form of assent—but assent to the rhythms of the natural world and not
its improvers and exploiters. And where do we put the titular figure
of Oblomov (1859), Ivan Goncharov’s paragon of immobility, whose
inability to get himself off his divan to do anything appears less a
matter of defiant will than an paralytic inertia? Is he an idler, or
his nation’s first refusenik?
Again, any pronouncement feels reductive. There are so many ways to
look at idleness. We have to differentiate the traveler in the airport
lounge who is fiddling with his iPod settings from the Whitmanic
dreamer who is loafing and inviting his soul. One end of the spectrum
of idleness is almost indistinguishable from boredom, the other may
find a person dreaming his way toward yet another proof for Fermat’s
Theorem. We can consider idleness as a principle, a lived vocation, if
you will, but then also regard it in flashes, which is how so many of
us practice it—as a respite from concerted activity, known to be of
limited duration and prized all the more for that reason. Who is idle,
what is idleness? It’s so much a question of the inner disposition,
and where the mind finds itself when the I is obeying no directives at
all. There is the further distinction between the subjective and
solitary and the collective, public expressions—what one feels alone
in an armchair, as opposed to the feeling of being with others in a
park on a Sunday or at a lake. Here well-known images of public
languor come to mind—Thomas Eakins’ swimmers, George Seurat’s Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on
the Grass—works all suffused with duration, a sense of life being
lived outside the radius of the clock face. Alongside these are vivid
verbal depictions, like the nostalgic rendering by E. B. White in
“Once More to the Lake,” or the indulgent tableaux of good eating with
friends in M. F. K. Fisher or Calvin Trillin, or Albert Camus calling
back the summers of his youth in Algiers:
In Algiers, you don’t talk about “going swimming” but about “knocking
off for a swim.” I won’t insist. People swim in the harbor and then go
rest on the buoys. When you pass a buoy where a pretty girl is
sitting, you shout to your friends, “I tell you it’s a seagull.” These
are healthy pleasures. They certainly seem ideal to the young men.
People together in a place, their actions loosely defined, not tending
toward any larger consummation.
Things are different now. New variables have been thrust into our
midst—or, more likely, we have evolved our way into them. The old
definitions of activity, the sturdy distinctions between work and
leisure, have been broken down by the encompassing currents of
digitized living. Obviously industry has not vanished, nor
industriousness, but it has widened and blurred its spectrum to
include the myriad tasks we accomplish with our fingertips. The spaces
and the physical movements of work and play are often nearly identical
now, and our commerce with the world, our work life, is far more
sedentary and cognitive than ever before. Purposeful doing is now
shadowed at every step with the possibilities of distraction. How do
we conceive of idleness in this new context? Are we indulging it every
time we switch from a work-related document to a quick perusal of
emails, or to surf through a few favorite shopping sites? Does
distraction eked out in the immediate space of duty count—or is it
just a sop thrown to the tyrant stealing most of our good hours?
I wonder how all this clicking and mouse-nudging impinges on our arts,
our literature, and if any of the old ease can survive. I was
delighted recently to open Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be
Bothered to Do It and hear him announcing, “In Rome I lived in the
grand manner of writers. I basically did nothing all day.” But Dyer
seems an exception to me, a survival from another era. We are few of
us in Rome, and fewer up for the “grand manner.” Who still idles?
Sieving with the mind’s own Google I pull up a few names: the late W.
G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson in her reverie-paced
scenemaking, Nicholson Baker in The Anthologist…But finally there are
few exemplars. Most contemporary prose, I find, agitates; it creates a
caffeinated vibration that is all about competing stimuli and the many
ways that the world overruns us. Idleness needs atmospheres of
indolence to survive. It is an endangered condition that asks for a
whole different climate of reading, one that is not about information,
or self-betterment, or keeping up with the latest book-club flavor,
but exists just for itself, idyllic, intransitive.
I recently heard a commencement speech by critic James Wood in which
he lamented the loss of pungency from our lives—so much is now
sanitized or hidden away from the public eye—and exhorted would-be
writers to search deep in their imaginations for the primary details
that animate prose and poetry. On a similar track, I wonder about
childhood itself. I worry that in our zeal to plan out and fill up our
children’s lives with lessons, play dates, CV-building activities we
are stripping them of the chance to experience untrammeled idleness.
The mind alert but not shunted along a set track, the impulses not
pegged to any productivity. The motionless bobber, the hand trailing
in the water, the shifting shapes of the clouds overhead. Idleness is
the mother of possibility, which is as much as necessity the mother of
inventiveness. Now that our technologies so adeptly bridge the old
divide between industriousness and relaxation, work and play, either
through oscillation or else a kind of merging, everything being merely
digits put to different uses, we ought to ask if we aren’t selling off
the site of our greatest possible happiness. “In wildness is the
preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau. In idleness, the corollary
maxim might run, is the salvaging of the inner life.
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