In the second week of my new, idle life, the withdrawals from the work fix have diminished somewhat. The pent up expectation of achievement - now that "I don't have the time" has seemingly ceased to be a valid refrain - made for a restless beginning of my self-chosen, temporary freedom from work - or the "necessary means to a livelihood," in the words of Bertrand Russell. Amusingly enough, my gripe at the end of the first week was that I hadn't been productive enough. Russell would have admonished me for carrying the precepts of wage-slavery, as it were, into my freedom�

Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Russell uses 'idleness' and 'leisure' interchangeably but, in our overworked times, the distinction between them is judgment-laden and not so subtle. That is precisely why I was deliberate in my choice to call this a period of "creative idleness," inspired by Mark Slouka's "Quitting the Paint Factory" in last November's Harper's Magazine:

Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn't. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure � particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology � is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn't shave; it's not a member of the team; it doesn't play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized. [Or put to good use. The wilderness of association we enter when we read, for example, is one of the world's great domains of imaginative diversity: a seedbed of individualism. What better reason to pave it then, to make it an accessory, like a personal organizer, a sure-fire way of raising your SAT score, or improving your communication skills for that next interview. You say you like to read? Then don't waste your time; put it to work. Order Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, with its picture of the bard in a business suit on the cover.]

Well, like Russell, Slouka would probably not be impressed with me either. He would have seen through the 'creative' qualifier and recognized my internalized reverence for the work ethic. I was essentially saying that idleness was not inherently a worthy use of my time; by 'creative' what I really meant was 'fruitful' and hence I'd be quite a bit less than idle. Hmmm�

It is (the) willingness to hand over our lives (to "work," defined as a means to wealth, and "success," as a synonym for it) that fascinates and appalls me. There's such a lovely perversity to it; it's so wonderfully counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then � because even this is not enough � you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.

I'm not sure whether that'd really be fair, though. I concede that declaring the aim of my idleness to be "creative" lends itself to some easy psychoanalysis, but it's not indicative of a belief in salvation through materially gainful "work." Yet, I do believe in work, the kind that I do when I'm "idle." The kind in which I lose myself, regardless of the outcome. The kind that I'm doing at this very moment. In this respect, I contradict neither Russell nor Slouka.

Russell's idea of a four-hour work day would work quite nicely for me, and, given our ability to telecommute, the commuting time wouldn�t need to be deducted from that in order to make it worthwhile�

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

However, the possibility that Russell seems to fail to consider is that of work that is in harmony with some aspect of an individual�s essence. This would indeed be nice work if you can get it, and a lucky few actually do get it � regardless of the height of their "brows." Methinks that Russell was one of these fortunate ones, as is Slouka. If I submit that I am only aspiring to find this good fortune for myself, I suspect that neither would disapprove. As Orlando May concluded, Russell's own prolificacy doesn't really contradict his championing of leisure -

The reference to industriousness here, and the somewhat interchangeable usage of 'idleness' and 'leisure' in this book, give a clue to Russell's attitudes towards his own prodigious output... What Russell argues for is the celebration and pursuit of free time, where one is able to do precisely as one pleases - within the usual minimum liberal norms, whether it is intensive intellectual labour, starting a magazine, or dozing in the sun with a glass of red wine.

The important point here is to recognize that dozing in the sun with a glass of wine is as worthy a use of one�s idle time as is any industrious pursuit, provided the sanctity of the idleness is maintained. This, I believe, is also what Slouka wants us to see -

At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we're attached to, this mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such magnitude can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape and mark its progress, like Lon Chaney's Invisible Man, by its effects: by the things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions it leaves be­hind. What we're leaving behind today, at record pace, is what­ever belief we might once have had in the value of unstructured time: in the privilege of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the importance of uninterrupted conversation, in the beauty of play. In the thing in itself � unmediated, leading nowhere. In the present moment.

Unstructured time is what I�ve permitted myself to have. W.H. Davies� "Leisure," which I learned as a kid, has suddenly resurfaced in my memory -

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

[My del.icio.us: idleness | leisure]

2:35:27 AM