Early Modern Notes

Crooked Timber, for one, beat me to linking to this piece in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, an extract from a book by Tom Hodgkinson.

And Hodgkinson cites EP Thompson, which has to make it a winner for me. On the work patterns of artisan weavers before the coming of factory regulation: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness.” And I thought, hey, that’s me! And academics everywhere! Thompson again: “The pattern persists among some self-employed - artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] - today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm.”

Because the piece isn’t about lazing about doing nothing all the time, more of a challenge to the idea that we must work all the time - and that ‘thinking’ isn’t real work. ‘Idling’ frees us to think, to ponder, to wonder. This is a celebration of the lie-in: “Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition.” (I do a lot of my best thinking and writing in the mornings before I’ve properly ‘got up’, relaxed in bed or on the sofa in my pyjamas, nestled with my laptop.)

And this is just glorious:

René Descartes, in the 17th century, was similarly addicted to inactivity. Indeed, it was absolutely at the centre of his philosophy. When young and studying with the Jesuits, he was unable to get up in the morning. They would throw buckets of cold water over him and he would turn over and go back to sleep. Then, because of his obvious genius, he was granted the special privilege of getting up late. This was his modus operandi because, of course, when he was lying in bed he was thinking. It is easy to see how someone so inactive should conclude that the body and the mind are separate entities. Laziness produced Cartesian duality. For him, lying in bed and thinking was the very essence of being human: Cogito, ergo sum, or, in other words, I lie in bed thinking, therefore I am.

And idling is political too:

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world… Governments do not like the idle. The idle worry them. They do not manufacture useless objects nor consume the useless products of labour. They cannot be monitored. They are out of control.

Go and read the whole thing. To be savoured, languorously, in a prone position.