Idle thoughts on idyllic living

BY BOB IRVINE

"Solon, a nobleman, poet and magistrate in ancient Athens, made many enlightened laws, among which was this gem – `that idleness was illegal'," wrote V McAloon in a letter to the Nelson Mail editor this week.

Illegal, it may not be yet, but idleness is undoubted heresy in the fidgetal digital age.

Every nanosecond must be accounted for. Business is god, and busyness is next to godliness.

The attitude is not new. In 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson, aged 25 and relatively unknown, wrote an essay called An Apology for Idlers. "Extreme busyness, whether at school, or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity," the great author suggested.

"Idleness ... does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class." Those dogmatic formularies are a pain in the bum, right enough.

Stevenson added that he could understand the resentment of a toiler "when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow". "The presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces is at once an insult and a disenchantment to those who do."

However, Stevenson pointed out that "there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy".

The essay had a distressing outcome in that it brought Stevenson to public attention, and a year later he was frantically busy on the road that would lead to classics such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He became idle for good at the tender age of 44. In spite of an industrious blot on his character, Stevenson has been anointed an Idle Idol by a British publication called The Idler, which campaigns against the work ethic.

(A beautiful spring day will do the same to this office-bound, sixpenny scribe.) "The intention of the magazine is to return dignity to the art of loafing; to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject," says The Idler website.

Editor Tom Hodgkinson walks the walk by publishing just twice a year instead of monthly. J B Priestley must be in line for Idol status. "Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing," he suggested. According to a Jewish proverb, "The hardest work is to go idle", and the Spanish argue that, "How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward".

Yet we cling to the Old Testament view that Satan finds work for idle hands. (To which Idler essayist Robert Hanks notes: "The mischiefs perpetrated by the moguls of industry in recent times suggest that busy hands are not immune to temptation".) James Thurber is another Idle Idol finalist for his pronouncement that "Tis better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all". Bertrand Russell is in the running with his view that "a great deal of harm is done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work".

And George Orwell has to be a bolter: "In practice, nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable." Stevenson toured the world before settling in the South Pacific, his spiritual home. Early colonists to the region had a job on their hands to persuade the natives to beaver eight hours a day for sixpence.

"Why?" the locals asked.

So that in old age they could be rewarded with a retirement spent fishing or lolling in the sun. "We do that now," the locals answered.

Stevenson believed that opposition to idleness is based on jealousy. You could ramp that up a notch. I reckon it's terror. We fear stopping to think; to let the brain off its leash for a giddy romp. We allocate a month each year for the purpose – then fill it with activity.

Give anyone a spare five minutes now and out comes the mobile for a comforting text session. Cellphones are the new cigarettes. It's a disease worthy of an awareness week. Or rather, a No Awareness Week.

As a starter, I'm prepared to champion – as long as it doesn't involve any work – a national Do Bugger All Day, with Navel Gazing in the morning and a session of Cloud Shape Identification after lunch.

Sorry, V McAloon, no sale. Nothing personal. I'd argue the point further but I've plonked a hankie over my ears and I'm going out to sit in the sun. If the devil does show up I promise to bellow, "Get thee behind me, Satan – and while you're there, plump those pillows."

- © Fairfax NZ News