[Ideas] come from day dreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘great, get bored.‘
The writer Agatha Christie was schooled at home until she was 16. In this 1955 interview, she talks about how she started writing:
People often ask me what made me take up writing. Many of them, I fancy, wonder whether to take my answer seriously, although it’s a strictly truthful one. You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I’d better qualify that — by admitting that I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts. But until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I’d had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle, in those days children had to do a good many things for themselves. They made their own doll’s furniture, and they made Christmas presents to give to their friends. (Nowadays, they’re just given money and told to buy their presents in a big store.) I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long dreary novel.
In her autobiography (my wife’s favorite book), she writes about how her idle childhood meant that she was always able to entertain herself:
We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work We pledge to leave our children alone That should mean that they leave us alone, too We reject the rampant consumerism that invades children from the moment they are born We read them poetry and fantastic stories without morals We drink alcohol without guilt We reject the inner Puritan We fill the house with music and laughter We don’t waste money on family days out and holidays We lie in bed for as long as possible We try not to interfere We push them into the garden and shut the door so that we can clean the house We both work as little as possible, particularly when the kids are small Time is more important than money Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness Down with school We fill the house with music and merriment
A history of how the weekend came to be and an exploration of what it means to take a weekly break from work. To get an idea of whether you’d like the book (which is sadly out-of-print), read The Atlantic essay of the same name.
This book helped me find a wider context for some of my own weekend anxieties. Rybczynski points out where some of the Sunday blues and meltdowns come from (emphasis mine):
We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it, too.
Part of the trouble is that so many our week-day jobs not only lack meaning, but craft, so we try to squeeze meaning and craft into the weekend:
The desire to do something well, whether it is sailing a boat—or building a boat—reflects a need that was previously met in the workplace. Competence was shown on the job—holidays were for messing around. Nowadays the situation is reversed. Technology has removed raft from most occupations… Hence an unexpected development in the history of leisure. For many, weekend free time has become not a chance to escape work but a chance to create work that is more meaningful—to work at recreation—in order to realize the personal satisfactions that the workplace no longer offers.
He laments the way a pastime like skiing has become less about being fun and more about being “good”:
Most outdoor sports, once simply muddled through, are now undertaken with a high degree of seriousness. “Professional” used to be a word that distinguished someone who was paid for performing an activity from the sportsman; today the word has increasingly come to denote anyone with a high degree of proficiency; “professional-quality” equipment is available to—and desired by—all. Conversely, “amateur,” a wonderful word literally meaning “lover,” has been degraded to mean a rank beginner, or anyone without a certain level of skill. “Just an amateur,” we say; it is not, as it once was, a compliment…. The lack of carelessness in our recreation, the sense of obligation to get things right, and the emphasis on protocol and decorum do represent an enslavement of a kind. People used to “play” tennis; now they “work” on their backhand.
This was written in 1991. Things have only gotten worse — especially when it comes to arts-based hobbies. It’s no longer enough to craft or sew in your free time, you have to start a “side project” or a “side hustle,” and sell your wares on Etsy or whatever.
My favorite bit is this quotation of G.K. Chesterton’s, arguing the merits of idleness and pointing out that free time does not necessarily equal freedom:
G. K. Chesterton pointed out that leisure should not be confused with liberty. Contrary to most people’s expectations, the presence of the first by no means assures the availability of the second. This confusion arose, according to Chesterton, because the term “leisure” is used to describe three different things: “The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.” The first, he acknowledged, was the most common form of leisure, and the one that of late —he was writing in the early 1890s —had shown the greatest quantitative increase. The second — —the liberty to fashion what one willed out of one’s leisure time— — was more unusual and tended to be the province of artists and other creative individuals. It was the third, however, that was obviously his favorite, because it allowed idleness — —in Chesterton’s view, the truest form of leisure.
Rybczynski has a few favorite pastimes which he puts forth as worthy ways to combat some of the problems above. On how gardening can help you cultivate an ability to be alone:
The capacity to be alone is a valuable character trait, often associated with creative individuals. But it may have a broader application. Anthony Storr, a psychiatrist who has written about the importance of solitude in the development of creativity, maintains that any balanced person will find the meaning of his life not only in his interpersonal relationships with family and friends but also in the solitary pursuit of personal interests. Cultivating a garden may, to use Pliny’s analogy, be a way to cultivate oneself.
And how great reading is as a leisure activity:
Solitary reading is the ideal vehicle for individual leisure. The reader can do something—or nothing. He can pick up one book or another. He sets the pace, reading uninterruptedly or leafing through a book at random, letting his imagination free to make what connections it will. Reading requires long periods of calm—at the comfortable rate of two hundred words a minute, it takes about fifteen hours to complete a typical novel. Reflection, contemplation, privacy, and solitude are also associated with reading books. And withdrawal. Both withdrawal from the world around one, from the cares of everyday life, and withdrawal into oneself.
What’s broken in this country won’t be fixed by pictures. Still, making an image feels galvanizing—a way to fight idleness. Making pictures is my natural, and perhaps only, true manner of expression. It’s a small thing, really, making a picture.
Every Sunday, Tim Gunn puts on a suit and walks through Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
It’s a sacred place for me, with all this incredible history and gorgeous work. I want to present myself properly. I just feel it’s an honor and a tribute to the work… [In the park] I go through a section called the Pinetum, an arboretum devoted almost exclusively to pine trees… I go to the Greek and Roman Galleries first. I’ll choose different objects to fixate upon… Then I go to the Balcony Lounge on the second floor and I have a glass or two of wine, and tea sandwiches. It’s really civilized. I always have my iPad. Frequently I’ll be researching something I’ve just seen.
Some people said it sounds kind of lonely or sad, but it sounds like paradise to me. It reminded me of Tim Kreider, in one of my favorite essays of all time, “The Referendum”:
…at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.
Wonderful color photographs made by a photographer who shunned the spotlight:
“In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined…. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.”
Here’s a great quote from the documentary about him, In No Great Hurry:
“I’m a person who likes to postpone things. I see no reason for being in a rush. When you consider many of the things that people treat very seriously, you realize that they don’t deserve to be treated that seriously. And that many of the things people worry about aren’t worth worrying about.
Let me tell you about the nap. It’s absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you and you’re going to sleep better. Well, as with everything, he was right. And so I now do that and I come back from the swimming pool I go to and I have my lunch and I read the paper and I take this glorious thing called a nap. And then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds you have no idea where you are. You’re just alive. That’s all you know and it’s bliss. It’s absolute bliss.
More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
betzistar
