They toil not, neither do they spin …
Summer is the mischief in me—with its evenings steeped in honeyed indolence—and I wonder if I can put a notion in my readers’ heads, or at least a bit of a bias, in favor of idleness.
Time was, defending idleness to academicians would have been like bringing owls to Athens. No one would have accused those measurers of flea-leaps at the Thinkery or the geometric scribblers of the Academy of being workaholics. But the evil age of industry has invaded even here, so that many a professor or grad student or dutiful undergrad lingers around the mills of toil on summer vacation. Some even claim that the purpose of education is to produce activists—or, as the French call them accurately, les militants. A corrective is in order.
Robert Louis Stevenson long ago offered the exhaustive defense of idlers. Yet, Stevenson’s defense was rather more of an offense, as he took the fight to our moiling age. Lacking his energy—and skill—the best I can do is offer a modest defense of the virtues of idleness.
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After all, to criticize idlers as somehow morally remiss is quite unjust. For one, an idler is very unlikely to get angry, and a bee in the mouth is the source of many a bad deed. An intellectual hatred is the worst—as an attendee at departmental meetings knows—but any hate requires far too much exertion for an idler. Idlers are nature’s gentlemen—and ladies. No one can stroll through life with a chip on his shoulder.
Idlers are more than fair. To steal another’s goods requires effort and risk. Nor does an idler covet his neighbor’s house, or wife, or manservant, or maidservant, or ox, or ass. The very thought of all that coveting would make him feel it’s time to take a nap. In fact, idlers are easy marks for hard-up Nigerian princes and little girls selling watered-down lemonade. Warding off all the world’s many pests just isn’t worth upsetting one’s repose.
What about the virtues of sense and thought? An idler has probably studied more flowers than a botanist, more birds than a birder, and much else besides. An idler’s mind is a veritable ocean where each kind does straight its own resemblance find. Nor is an idler a mere cloud-gazer, but has also considered such practical matters as shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, cabbages and kings. An idler has a keen ear for merry-whistled tunes and a sharp eye—and ready tongue—for wild strawberries on the hill.
With a mens sana in corpore sano, idlers enjoy the best walk. Slow, of course, though not crawling; the opposite of labored; free, flowing, head up, enjoying the view. Socrates, consummate idler, walked just this way. So many idlers pranced about Paris that boulevardiers and flâneurs strolled right from French into English. Never in a hurry, an idler avoids cars and buses and bicycles. That’s why idlers tend to live in cities, where they can satisfy their needs à pied.
(God forbid an idler stumble into a “transportation system,” with all its arrivals and departures scheduled down to the second. Stevenson saw clearly that an idler is a Diogenes, a citizen of the world, a rule unto himself, even if he never leaves his town square. The idler is the very opposite of the crowd in a train station or airport, nameless ciphers subject to a faceless authority far more arbitrary than Alexander.)
Some people think idlers must be anti-social, like the reclusive monkfish, lurking at the bottom of the monstrous world. But this is the idler’s schein. An idler has a nose for avoiding trouble and troublesome people, the sort who immediately ask you, “What are you working on?” and then proceed to gabble on about their latest article or the book they’re writing that will change the “field.” For the right companions, an idler’s conversation offers apples of gold in pictures of silver. And who but a true idler can enjoy both the jocund rebeck’s sound and the quiet of the mossy cell?
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Others accuse idleness of monotony: “I can’t abide doing nothing!” (Surely Beelzebub—lover of busybodies—snuck into the good book the proverb that idle hands are the devil’s workshop.) This complaint mistakes idleness for sloth. A true idler flees monotony like the plague. (Yet another reason he’s out of sorts with modern life.) At the seashore, one idler may have his ear to his transistor, another gently up and down leads the uncertain children, and yet another wheels the rigid old along for them to feel a final summer. An idler is always on the lookout for new views—a fountain’s sliding foot here, a fruit tree’s mossy root there. This is why idlers love books, kind heaven’s white decoys, and adore libraries—at least they did, before libraries were transformed into community service centers. A true aristocrat of the spirit, an idler is the sole remaining expert in the noble art of far niente.
To our democratic age, the idler’s real sin is lack of productivity. What you produce doesn’t matter so much as that you’re doing something. Even colleges claim to produce workers, leaders, and founders! It used to be that inherited wealth provided some excuse for idleness. Now, how cold rings Warren Buffett’s advice to leave your children, “Enough to do whatever they want but not so much as to let them do nothing.” Idleness does not require riches, but moderate means help. Yet another perversity of our times is how busy our rich are, with work, sports, travel, philanthropy, and “fun.” So exhausting, they who could be the very flower of idleness. And as Buffett indicates, the last thing they want is for their children to be idle. These poor souls, fortune’s fools, are “enriched” to the gills, and so tend to grow up hesitant, incurious, insecure, distracted, and utterly inexperienced in just being.
But idlers are equanimous, and so should we be. Life is not all “optimization,” thank goodness. What are spectators at a sports game but idlers? They’re not in the arena or selling hot-dogs in the stands, as observed by Pythagoras, who studiously avoided work himself. The same goes for audiences of concerts, plays, TV, or movies, and that vast playground of idleness, social media. ChatGPT and its relatives seem like real drudges, until you recognize that they’re nothing but pattern-recognizing, probabilistic response-generators, that is, exquisite imitators—and what’s dearer to an idler’s heart than mimicry?
So, dear readers, be not coy, and tell time’s winged chariot to get off your back. Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Also, don’t bother accusing me of contradiction for mounting this defense of idleness. I never claimed to be a full-flower idler. In any event, to be idle, one must do some work, even hard work. Food tastes sweetest after a fast, and even idleness turns to ashes in one’s mouth if it’s not broken up with bouts of exertion. But work is for the sake of leisure, not the other way around.
Image: “Idleness” by madras91 on Wikimedia Commons
