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Writers and other ‘creative artists’ sometimes appear to be idle when they are engrossed in the preliminary phase of creation. A wise partner will recognise this process and protect it: ‘Hush, dear — Daddy may be thinking.’ Hodgkinson quotes Walter Benjamin, ‘one of the great literary Euro-slackers’, testifying that Beethoven when wandering daily around the ramparts of Vienna, apparently loafing, was actually composing symphonies in his head.
The imagination functions mysteriously, even in sleep. ‘Kubla Khan came to Coleridge in a dream,’ Hodgkinson points out,
as did the tune for ‘Yesterday’ to Paul McCartney. The idea for Frankenstein revealed itself to the young Mary Shelley in a waking dream; Einstein said that a breakthrough in his theory of relativity had come to him in a dream; Descartes had a dream that set him on the path towards his whole philosophical system (he said it was ‘the most important affair’ of his life). Mendeleyev dreamt the Periodic Table after falling asleep at his desk.
Hodgkinson casts his net wide. One of his favourite proponents of leisure, the Chinese–American popular philosopher Lin Yutang, ‘tells us that the Chinese scholar Ouyang Hsiu confessed to three “ons” where he did his best writing: “on the pillow, on horseback and on the toilet”’. What Keats called ‘delicious diligent indolence’ can be richly productive.
Hodgkinson blames the Puritan ethic and the Industrial Revolution for the regimentation of modern factories, offices and shops, and recommends a further revolution to restore English individuality. In the meantime, ‘We need more idler-friendly doctors’ to provide excuses for people who feel they must keep their jobs but yearn for relief.
Alarm clocks, he says, should be thrown away. Fishing is ‘the idler’s sport par excellence’. Long lunches should be followed by long siestas to double the day’s potential, providing energy and enthusiasm for long nights of drink and talk. Smoking is spiritually soothing, though perhaps physically destructive.
Liberal wisdom abounds on every page. How To Be Idle may enable you to hear the sound of one hand clapping, in preparation for the everlasting idleness of death.
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Also by Patrick Skene-Catling
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