JIM WETZEL WRITES:

That’s an interesting passage from Stevenson, and I had to read it all before my confusion cleared up. What he called “idleness” differs from what I think of by that term: 

It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. 

I think that by “idleness,” he means what I would have called “leisure;” I would think of those folk passing their hours in a sort of coma as being “idle” – meaning, doing exactly nothing. It seems to me that the person who can find something to think about by looking out any window, or something to contemplate, or play with, along any path they might walk would better be described as busy. But they are busy with whatever comes their way; busy in an accepting sort of way. 

Living near Fort Wayne, Indiana, I often hear people complaining that “there’s nothing to do.” This reveals, I think, a mental and spiritual poverty – a lack of inner resources. Why is “entertainment” required, when there are libraries, and places to walk, and the occasional place to sit down, see what goes on, and connect it with what you read yesterday, and what you saw the day before? 

Thank you for your writing – and thinking.

Laura writes:

Thanks for writing.

Yes, I see what you mean. Leisure is active, with inner projects, and idleness is stupor. Josef Pieper makes a strong distinction between relaxation that simply restores a person for work and genuine leisure that has no utilitarian purpose. People who are overworked cannot have any leisure because they are just too tired. When they are doing nothing, they are really prepping themselves for work, “moiling in the gold-mill.”

By the way, I want to acknowledge, as I said in my essay on Pieper, how unacceptable it is to talk about leisure when many people are unemployed and the economy is dong poorly. The unemployed, as much as anyone, need leisure. One of the worst things about being unemployed and looking for work is that one feels one is undeserving of any time off. This can affect everyone to create a climate of heightened anxiety, as if at every moment we must be focused on economic matters or the entire country will come to a standstill. But this is a symptom of a larger phenomenon, the dehumanizing glorification of activity and of work. No one should be thinking or talking about work on a Sunday. We should give even the unemployed a day off from the subject.

Perhaps this inner poverty you mention accounts for the presence of television screens in doctors’ offices and bus stations and supermarkets today. I know some of this is marketing, with the telelvisions used for advertising, but it seems more proof that people are distracting themselves to death. They dread the empty moment. Why else would they tolerate these screens? I always think of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 when I find myself in a waiting room confronted with an enormous screen. Remember how in the book a group of radicals committed to silence, to words and, at least indirectly, to the right to leisure fled for the remote woods.

The truth is, leisure and silence are politically dangerous. In our moments of nothingness, we have a sense of life as a unified whole. To be mentally enslaved is to always either focus on discrete tasks or exist in that coma Stevenson mentioned.

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