« In classical antiquity, the upper classes of both Greece and Rome looked down upon standard notions of work. Nearly full-time leisure, otium, was among the entitlements of aristocracy in Rome. [...] In Plato’s Republic, no honor is attributed to business, which, it was understood, was done by vile mercenaries. [...]
Rest has not been a subject that philosophers have shown much interest in, but it has been taken up by the great French belle-lettrists. In A History of Rest, Corbin quotes Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Diderot, Joubert, Rousseau, and others on the subject. Pascal is perhaps most trenchant among them, for he understood that human beings both seek and detest rest. [...] The most famous of Pascal’s comments, from the notebooks he called his Pensées, is that “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
For Montaigne, rest was where tranquility was to be found, and tranquility precludes ambition. “Glory and tranquility,” he writes, “cannot dwell in the same lodgings.” For La Rochefoucauld, rest brings on retirement, in which “taste turns then to silent, insensible objects . . . a blissful state of the soul, which comforts it for all its losses, and which acts as a substitute for all good things.” For La Bruyère, “life is short and tedious, and is wholly spent in wishing; we trust to find rest and enjoyment at some future time, often at an age when our blessings, youth and health, have already left us.” Joubert held that “being deprived of rest means much to the soul. Rest is of no small matter to it. It represents a state where the soul is uniquely free to follow its own movement without outside impulses.”
Most of us simultaneously seek rest and yet are wary of the boredom implicit in it. The contradiction would appear to be irresolvable. Perhaps the only creature known to resolve it is cats. In his Journal, Jules Renard writes that “the ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.” He notes that “a cat, who sleeps twenty hours out of twenty-four, is God’s most perfect creation,” and goes on to remark on “the vitality of the cat, who appears so lazy,” adding that “laziness is the habit of resting before fatigue sets in.”
“The Right to Be Lazy” is the title of an essay by Paul Lafargue (1842–1911) [...]. Writing at the height of the Industrial Revolution, with workers, many of them children, working a 10-, 12-, sometimes 15-hour day, Lafargue held that such a heavy workload was, on all counts, unnecessary, indeed insufferable. Noting that the English had reduced their factory workday by two hours while the country’s production increased, he suggested eliminating “the fuming madness for work” in France and elsewhere. Evoking the “dizzying effect…limiting the workday to three hours [would] have on French production” Lafargue concludes his essay on this vocative note: “Oh, Laziness, take pity on our long destitution! Oh, Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou balm to human suffering!”
I may have achieved Lafargue’s ideal of the three-hour day. I rarely spent more than that at my computer, attempting to write essays, book reviews, short stories. I put in more time reading for some of this work, but then, I have never been able to consider reading real work. Writing is not an hourly job. Ideas, thoughts, notions, phrases, single words about things I am currently writing come to me at odd, which is to say just about all, times: upon waking, in the shower, when preparing a meal. [...]
Boredom does not worry me. I have been bored only in the company of bores, but never when alone. The world is too interesting, often too amusing, a place to allow for boredom. When not writing, or thinking about what I shall be writing, I find interest in contemplating the richness of life, its comedy, yes, its sadness. »
— Joseph Epstein, "Rest Easy"
