Beauty brings us to a halt: it imposes, if only for a flash, the cessation of activity. (On the lawn in front of the library, seeing a runner in red shorts complete the last flailing strides of a sprint before pitching forward, his fingers caressing soft dirt: I let my book fall.) Indolence and aesthetic experience both involve feelings of unbidden influence, involuntariness or absence of will. But where the experience of beauty is often significant and always pleasurable, idleness is more equivocal in its effects and character. Essentially contentless, idleness obtains its phenomenological shape from the objects around us—the pliancy of a chair, the gloss of an advertisement—and the thoughts and desires within us.
O’Connor, to his credit, resists conflating idleness with aesthetic bliss, or animal repose, or other unambiguously positive varieties of passivity. Yet experience without content has little to recommend it. Without some consciously chosen value that organizes how we do nothing, we may find that our idle time makes us less free rather than more.
~ Charlie Tyson, from “Idleness” in The Point (September 5, 2019)
Source: Quote – Thank you The Hammock Papers. Photo: via see more.
He is talking about weekends. He describes, lingeringly, the Saturday Morning lie-in. Drowsing, love-making, breakfast in bed. Up, finally, for a coffee and a leaf through the papers. A long bath. Then choices, choices: shopping, a long walk, a late lunch? An afternoon movie, an art gallery? More sleep? A haircut, a trip to the gym. Read a novel. Dinner with friends, the opera, a party. Sunday morning, more of the same.
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