The Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov once said of writers, “And to write and write, like a wheel or a machine, tomorrow, the day after, on holidays; summer will come—and he must still be writing. When is he to stop and rest? Unfortunate man?” Goncharov was born in 1812 and died in 1891, so I am clearly not the model for the writer he was talking about—even though, my prolificacy having often been commented upon, I could otherwise well be. The eponymous hero of his novel Oblomov feels the same way about another character in the book who loves travel, and a second one who enjoys a lively social life, and a third who works hard in the hope of promotion. All of them are viewed by Oblomov as absurdly out of synch with life’s real purpose. This purpose, as Oblomov sees it, is to lie abed doing nothing all the days of one’s life. If rest may be said to have a champion, it is Oblomov, a gentleman by birth for whom “life was divided, in his opinion, into two halves: one consisted of work and boredom—these words were for him synonymous—the other of rest and peaceful good-humor.” Rest, unrelenting rest, is the name of Oblomov’s game.
“Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little,” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote, “so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.” “Rest” is one of those words, simple-sounding yet not easily defined. As a verb, rest means to “cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength”; as a noun, “an instance or period of relaxing or ceasing to engage in strenuous or stressful activity.” Why isn’t this very helpful?
Rest is not quite synonymous with sleep, leisure, or laziness. When a man in his mid-70s or older asks another man of roughly the same age if he is “getting much,” he probably isn’t referring to sex but to sleep. Like as not, neither man is getting much sleep, for few older men I know make it through the night without having to get up two, three, or more times. Some are compelled to do so to visit the House of Commons, as Dylan Thomas called the bathroom. Others find their minds racing, or their sleep invaded by goofy dreams. I had a friend, a contemporary, who suffered the trifecta of insomnia, megalomania, and paranoia, and so spent the better parts of his nights awake, worrying about losing power he didn’t really have.
As an adolescent, I remember sleeping eight-, nine-, 10-hour periods. Now if I can do two or three hours at a stretch, I feel vaguely triumphant. Conversations with friends, though they bring much pleasure, tend toward the stimulating and so do not necessarily qualify as rest. Working out of my apartment, as I have for many years now, I often take afternoon naps, but these naps do not so much bring on a restful feeling as they ward off the inevitable fatigue of a man in his 80s.
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Art of the Nap,” in which I set out my prowess at the act. What I remember about the essay today is an anecdote involving Hugh Lloyd-Jones, then regius professor of Greek at Oxford (because he was still alive, I didn’t use his name). Lloyd-Jones seemed to me in those days an Englishman to the highest power: He seemed to have 50 or 60 teeth, Himalayas of dandruff covered the shoulders of his blue blazer, and he spoke with a slight Oxbridge stammer. When I asked him if he napped, he replied, “Whenever possible.” Supine or prone? “Supine.” On couch or bed? “Bed.” Trousers on or off? “Generally off.” And for how long? “That depends,” he answered, “on when the cats get up.”
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The concept of rest is as old as the Bible. On the seventh day, after creating the world and all that was in it, we are told that the Lord rested. Not, however, in His case, from fatigue, but to contemplate His further creations. Alain Corbin, a French scholar who has recently published a brief History of Rest, holds that for God, the day of rest was “a creative pause.” Later on, God tells Moses: “Speak to the sons of Israel and say, ‘You must keep my sabbaths carefully, because the sabbath is a sign between myself and you from generation to generation to show that it is I who sanctify you. You must keep the sabbath, then; it is to be held sacred by you.’”
Keeping the Sabbath, in Corbin’s words, is not about rest alone but “the holy nature of that rest.” Mutatis mutandis, Christians, who were of course initially mostly Jews, took up the notion of a holy day of rest, with theirs being Sunday. In some quarters, both religions are even now defined by their days of rest. Militant Islamists have been known to claim that “after we finish off the Saturday people, we shall finish you, the Sunday people.” Meanwhile, it is understood that there is no rest for the wicked, which is to say none in Hell, which in good part is what must make it so hellish.
Orthodox Jews continue meticulously to observe the Sabbath, and serious Christians to take communion on Sundays. One of the three elevators in the 15-story building in Chicago in which my parents lived was set to stop at every floor all through Saturday, so as not to force Orthodox Jews to violate the Sabbath by having to push a button and make the elevator move. Or consider the institution of the Shabbos goy, the Gentile hired by Orthodox Jews to attend to all the turning on of furnaces, lighting of lamps, warming of meals, and other exertions outlawed on the Sabbath in the books of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers.
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 both countries, trades were considered nugatory, left largely to slaves. Nor was art much esteemed. Defending one’s polis or state and arguing ideas was where the action was. Lycurgus, the great lawgiver of Sparta, created a society wholly devoted to producing warriors. 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. “Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest,” Pascal wrote, “without passion, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.” 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.”
Corbin considers the toll of enforced rest through imprisonment or exile. He reminds us that rest was once considered the main cure for tuberculosis and was also recommended as a remedy for impotence. In more recent times, rest has also been prescribed for its therapeutic value generally. Corbin writes of a Dr. Charles Féré, who in the late-19th century “associated rest with the power to reduce the number of suicides, to lower crime levels and even…to encourage savings.” As it began to lose its holy existence, rest was increasingly becoming part of what Corbin terms “a secular morality.”
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), who married the second of Karl Marx’s four daughters and is said to have been the first person to use the word “Marxist.” 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!”
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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. I have taken to keeping my cellphone on my bedside table to take notes on things that occur to me at various hours of the night about compositions at which I am currently at work.
The closest I come to rest, I suppose, are the hours I spend watching television, much of it news and sports. But I don’t feel especially well rested after arising from having spent the past few hours listening to accounts of the world’s woes on the news or staring at large men crash into one another on a basketball court or football field. Emmitt Smith, formerly of the Dallas Cowboys, claimed that being a running back on any Sunday in the National Football League was akin to getting into 30 car accidents, which doesn’t sound like an exaggeration to me and is not exactly stress-reducing for the onlooker.
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.
Work can be onerous or glorious. Either way, it is at the center of most of our lives. When work is withdrawn, even through retirement on the most generous terms, it leaves a hole, one often filled by a feeling of desolation sometimes bordering on trauma. Though not in the same punishing category as imprisonment or exile, retirement can be a form of enforced rest. I have heard stories of (chiefly) men seeking therapy to get past the staggering dislocation retirement has brought them. Rest, it seems, has to be self-chosen, never imposed, to be truly restorative.
Work itself brings its pleasures and displeasures. As for mine, a great deal has been said about the difficulties of writing. The sportswriter Red Smith once claimed that “writing is easy. You just sit down at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.” I have never found it so. I have always found writing an act of discovery, and the discovery, for me, often comes in the very composition of sentences whose shape and form are often a surprise. Rewriting, or revisions of what I have earlier written, brings its own pleasure. Ernest Hemingway claimed that “the only kind of writing is rewriting,” which, in an age I otherwise think of as techno-tyranny, the computer has made much easier.
I feel fortunate in being able to continue scribbling away late into my 80s, holding retirement at bay, rendering it (I hope against hope) coterminous with death. Writers tend to divide between those who do not really need to write and those who urgently need to do so. I am among the latter. If a week or so goes by in which I haven’t written anything, I feel my life to be pointless, my place in the world dubious. Plenty of time to rest later. Cemeteries, as Corbin writes, “are sometimes referred to as gardens of rest.”
Meanwhile, except for in the lives of seriously religious Christians, Sunday long ago lost its connection to the holy and became a secular Sabbath. For many years, it remained a day apart. As a European, Corbin makes no mention of American blue laws. A heritage of American Puritanism, blue laws prevented the sale of liquor or the exhibition of public entertainment on Sundays in many American states and cities. They also often prevented shopping generally, forcing most stores to remain closed. While they were in force, blue laws lent Sunday an aura of dullness, of boredom. Sunday Bloody Sunday, the title of a 1971 movie, touches on this aspect of enforced rest.
Corbin makes more than one mention of seaside resorts as places of rest. Beach holidays, once quite popular for people who could afford them, have become less so owing to the fear of the skin cancer brought on by extended exposure to the sun. Travel on cruise ships was once regarded by many as organized rest, though anyone who has read David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is unlikely to set off on a cruise, with all its planned activities, lectures, endless food trolleys, not to speak of entrapment by one’s fellow travelers—whom Henry James, in a slightly different context, referred to as his “detested fellow pilgrims.”
One definition of the good life is a perfect balance between useful work and contented rest. Michael Oakeshott, a thinker always worth considering, argues otherwise. He writes: “We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; and when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest—and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”
Oakeshott is doubtless right. The perfect way of life is probably unattainable. Which doesn’t mean we are allowed to give up the search. The goal is elusive, the striving endless, and to carry it on through life requires—yes, you will have guessed it—lots of rest.
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