Michaelangelo's Rachel and Leah, adorning the tomb of Julius II
Immediately
following the Dante seminar reported on last week we moved into the Princeton
University Reunions weekend. The
Princeton class reunions constitute a phenomenon that must be seen to be
believed. I taught at this place
for forty years and hence had personal connections with individual students in
forty graduating classes. I came
to know and sometimes know well dozens of older alumni who graduated well
before my arrival. Furthermore
this summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of my doctorate in
the department of which I would one day become the chairman. Hence the emotion was copious if viscous. On another occasion I might try to
summarize the experience in a brief essay, but I rather doubt it. Suffice it to say that this year the
heat was stifling, the food too abundant, the spiritual and physical effort
rather exhausting.
We
had as an overnight guest on Sunday a very old and genial but rarely seen friend
from the class of 1973, now an aging Stanford professor. We had a most mellow evening, and I
awoke on Monday with a strange sense of well-being. Perhaps what was strange was not the sense itself but its
explicit perception. Robust good
health should be a norm, but my experience over the years has demonstrated an
inner perversity that allows me to appreciate feeling really good only when I
am actually not feeling so hot. I
know that I am not alone in lamenting the unhappy paradox that too often presence
can be confirmed only by absence.
As the Canadian philosopher J. Mitchell puts it,
Don't
it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone…
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone…
On
this occasion, however, I was keenly aware of what I got while I still got it,
so to speak, and that was an appreciation of a lack of obligation. Such obligations as I had recently
liquidated were hardly onerous. My
current book had been put to bed at the publishers, and was beyond my powers to
alter for good or ill. I had
talked a little about Dante with a group of highly intelligent people. I had given a ten-minute talk at a
Reunions panel discussion. And I
had mowed the lawn. What other
worlds to conquer could there possibly be? I had absolutely nothing I had to do before taking off on a
trip to Sri Lanka (!) in a week’s time.
I was luxuriating in a rare feeling of leisure. That feeling lasted until the early
afternoon, when I succumbed to the nascent worry that I was somehow wasting
time.
The
problem is, leisure is
complicated. It rather depends
upon how you assess the hierarchy of doing something and doing nothing, Don’t
just do something. Stand there! In Latin, leisure was called otium, and it was generally a good
thing. Its negation was negotium—“negotiation” or “doing
business”. As you can tell from
the current use of the adjective otiose,
however, we have a deep suspicion of otium.
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)
I
have in my time read at least two terrific books about leisure. The first, one of the classics of my
radical youth, was Veblen’s Theory of the
Leisure Class (1899), which was among the first volumes in my small
personal collection of the Modern Library. Veblen takes as his arena of inquiry the sociology and
anthropology of the Gilded Age—the 1880s being sort of Reagan’s Eighties on
Steroids. It was Veblen who
invented, or at least popularized, the idea of conspicuous consumption: “Conspicuous
consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of
leisure.” Veblen was not a
Marxist, but like Marx he advanced a “labor theory” of value: “Labor wants pride and joy in
doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful—to be
treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister.”
The Theory of the Leisure Class is
brilliant, often quite witty, and finally very sad; but it does not entirely
discredit the concept of leisure. Veblen
is naturally selective in his literary representations of the idle rich. Not all of them were lighting cigars with five dollar
bills. The entire current issue of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Spring
2013) is given over to a fascinating long article or short monograph by Timothy
Husband entitled “Creating the Cloisters”—meaning, of course, the fabulous
collection of medieval art housed in a translated monastery in Tryon Park in
upper Manhattan. This great
boon to humanity came about through the sometimes comical and often extremely
busy activities of numerous American Mandarins of the leisure class, especially
John Davidson Rockefeller, Jr.
One
place where the old “good” sense of otium
survived was the medieval monastery.
In medieval monastic texts otium
was often praised as the enabler of contemplation. Mary was superior to Martha, and Rachel to Leah. This medieval concept was ably
articulated in modern form by the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in
a book with the arresting title Leisure:
the Basis of Culture (English translation with introduction by T. S. Eliot, 1952).
Josef Pieper (1904-1997)
It
may surprise us to learn that culture
and cult (cultus, religious worship) derive from a common source. Pieper argues that real happiness is to
be found in the shared worship of religious community—a gratuitous and
materially unproductive activity made possible only by leisure. “The ultimate meaning of the active
life,” he writes, “is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.” Against this truth the clouded human
mind instinctively rebels. "Man seems to mistrust
everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what
he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a
gift." So I sat down at the
computer and started to write an essay about—leisure.
