The Mother of Possibility

Tags:: commerce,; ennui,; idleness,; inspiration,; leisure,; work ethic

Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful 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.

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Обломовщина Oblomov
Ivan Goncharov
The main titled character
has to steal the cake;
if that is at all possible
to do for the premier idler.
"Not to Be" !!!

Posted by Mark Breza on Sun 20 Mar 2011
Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Should psychology be a vice?
--Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Posted by Shad on Mon 21 Mar 2011
Keats, Shelly, Blake and all those guys did not expect to be supported by money taken from the non idle, from people who chose a different lifestyle. Idleness is okay as long as the idle takes responsibility for themselves.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Posted by Dana on Mon 21 Mar 2011
Ditto Granite. Bleh.

Posted by Peetr on Mon 21 Mar 2011
So far I've only scanned Sven Berkert's essay "The Mother of Possibility" but didn't find any mention of Josef Pieper's LEISURE, THE BASIS OF CULTURE, and I wondered if he is aware of it. And I also want to say thank you for the references to other writers on the subject.
Robert Scarlett

Posted by Robert Scarlett on Mon 21 Mar 2011
Nice essay. Just recently penned a post on idleness:

http://thenecromancer.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/in-praise-of-idleness/

Also been writing about "the philosophy of slack", a similar if not identical theme...

Posted by The Necromancer on Mon 21 Mar 2011
Every man is unique so we could not impose a same law for everyone.Idleness may be suitable for some one but that one is not a ideal to follow by everyone.Those who have bumper money and no worry about tomorrow `s bread he may enjoy idleness for others this kind of lavish life is not possible

Posted by Ramesh Raghuvanshi on Mon 21 Mar 2011
Idleness was, and still is, the luxury of the rich (preferably inherited). Everyone else has to work. There was a brief happy time for the Western nations when most people could have the weekends off, but in the long history of human kind, that period was less than a drop in the ocean.

Posted by Gavin on Mon 21 Mar 2011
The thing about idling is that, in my experience anyway, and in contrast to Birkerts' comparison, one often needs to be a Bartleby, to refuse the many "improvers and exploiters" and by doing so allow oneself time and space to "assent to the rhythms of the natural world."

Posted by Molly Williams on Wed 30 Mar 2011
What about Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" - or is he too alien - an Englishman?!

Posted by Ali Sherazee on Thu 31 Mar 2011
What a wonderful essay! This has made my day. Thank you.

Posted by Elke on Wed 6 Apr 2011
This is an excellent essay.

>Idleness was, and still is, the luxury of the rich (preferably inherited). Everyone else has to work.

I work 3 months of the year and live in an RV full-time. You don't need money to be idle, just imagination. We are under-employed wandering gypsy idlers and I wouldn't live any other way.

Posted by Darrell on Sat 9 Apr 2011
Today's world needs more Laphams..the essay is a real treasure.

Posted by Abir on Fri 3 Jun 2011