Leisure: The Basis of Culture {Chapter 3}

I must confess that this week’s reading was harder for me than last week’s. I have no idea why, for I read the chapter earlier in order to give myself time to chew on it, and I read both translations this time, one of them online and the other with real pages to flip.

It wasn’t that I didn’t comprehend, it was that I struggled. I still struggle, for instance, with a reflexive definition of leisure which smacks of Buddhism: some guy, sitting on a hill, becoming one with the universe by doing…absolutely nothing. And yet, I know that this is not what Pieper is talking about because he himself writes:

Idleness, in the medieval view, means that a man prefers to forgo the rights, or if you prefer the claims, that belong to his nature. In a word, he does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means that he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally, is.

What is the man-on-a-hill, if not forgoing the claims that nature has upon him, at least in a general sense? I remember a homeless man I met once in Santa Monica. I think I’ve brought him up here before, for he is the reason I was jaded in regard to the homeless for quite some time. This man, named David, was homeless by choice. He had a sort of transcendent aura about him, like he was above the things of this world. In time, I learned that he had, in the words of Pieper, forgone the claims of nature. He had not just abandoned the world’s luxuries, but also his responsibility to feed, clothe, and protect his wife and child.

Because of this I have this desire to tread lightly, to make sure I know exactly what leisure is and isn’t. I know in my mind that Pieper was giving this lecture in Germany immediately after the conclusion of World War II. I know that the Germans had given themselves to, as Neil Postman would call it, technopoly and a mechanical/technological view of mankind. In this view, there is no room for any sort of transcendence–no soul, no wisdom, no abundant spiritual life.

However, comma.

I also try to balance that by the fact that I am living in a culture which values entertainment more than work, for the most part. So the struggle here is the opposite — instead of fighting Total Work, we fight sloth, idleness. Though leisure is neither total work nor idleness, I still find myself juggling these concepts, trying to be careful that, in the end, I let Scripture tell me of the Ideal Type.

One thing that is helping frame all of this for me is, naturally, the CiRCE talks. I wish I had all of my mental notes down on paper, because then I might know who pointed this out, but in one of the {many} lectures, someone explained that when Descartes resolved to begin with doubt, the result was a foundation of anxiety. I thought of this when I read:

[I]dleness, according to traditional teaching, is the source of many faults and among others of that deep-seated lack of calm which makes leisure impossible.

Ours is a restless age, and yet I do think I’ve met folks who are exceptionally restless. One of the things that stands out about these people in my memories of them is that they are incapable of relaxing. They can’t sit and have a conversation. They can’t relax during a meal. At the same time, they are drawn to escapism in the form of television, video games, trashy novels, and/or movies, claiming that it helps them “relax.” James Taylor wrote:

To be placed at a 45 [degree] angle in a reclining chair, drink in one hand, remote control in the other, in front of the television, is not leisure but something closer to sloth of mind and body.

I like a decent movie as well as the next person, but I have noticed that anxiety and sloth seem to be a matched pair. We seek out the sloth because we feel we “deserve” it after so much anxiety, and yet the mystery is that the two seem to feed on each other. In my own life, the more I have let go of sloth, the less my anxiety becomes.

And so, interestingly enough, we come to the word leisure being quite akin to a word I like to use: transcendence. It is more a state of a soul than anything else. A person can have back-to-back days which are almost identical, and one can be leisurely and the other anxious, and the difference is the state of soul. Pieper says:

[L]eisure implies {n the first place} an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy’, but letting things happen.

Letting things happen. This little phrase resounds in my soul. One of my big desires is that our learning has time to let things happen. It is hard to balance, for I really do think that, for instance, spelling needs to be done almost daily, for my son to grow up free. We can’t just chase liberty without giving the children the tools to preserve it. However, it is also true that if I just rush through a daily list the souls of the children will be far from formed.

Today was a day where I had to force leisure into the situation because we had bumps everywhere in the road. My toddler was cranky. My baby was ambivalent about napping, but not happy anywhere. The little girls wanted to practice walking in high heels. My son tackled said girls every chance he got. It was all I could do to force leisure into the situation, for chaos had the upper hand most of the morning.

One of the ways I have learned to “force” leisure is to be willing to compromise with the To-Do list. I couldn’t live without a list; I’d just read a book and ignore my children and that’s a fact. However, if the list becomes a dictator, there is no leisure. There is only the rush to plow through and get it done. Somewhere, there has to be room to discuss, for instance, what exactly is the nature of a bad king.

So sometimes, we let a lesson go until tomorrow. Sometimes, we extend the school day, finishing a reading later in the afternoon, or even at night. Sometimes, we reorganize our plan in order to accommodate the learning. Sometimes, we keep learning while we’re eating our lunch. Sometimes, we practice Latin at the grocery store.

The flexibility, the openness to learning whenever and however it happens is so necessary, and yet so not an inborn quality for most of us. It certainly isn’t for me. But now that I am beginning to learn it, there is a sweetness about our days that wasn’t there before. Pieper writes:

[T]here is also a certain happiness in leisure, something of the happiness that comes from the recognition of the mysteriousness of the universe and the recognition of our incapacity to understand it, that comes with a deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course.

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Read More:

-More book club entries over at Cindy’s.
-Online version of Leisure: the Basis of Culture
-A couple helpful definitions…acedia in the Dictionary and over at Wikipedia