On the day I write this (a couple of days before I post) I find myself reflecting on yesterday. Yesterday was a Saturday, I was not at work, I had no rehearsals (for I’m in a play) and I had no plans or particular desires. It was a lazy day and I spent it doing things that had no real purpose yet it was a day that was very satisfying and very productive.
I did some chores, doing my laundry and hoovering the house. I made a weird little playlist, inspired by some weird little playlists I made years before. I painted a silly and slightly wonky mural in the back garden of a punk seagull singing karaoke into a pink swirly lollypop. I also finally finished Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
I need to let the book digest a little before I can talk about it much, but in that final volume the narrator, Marcel, realises that the wasted years of his life haven’t been wasted but were actually the accumulation of all the experiences that he needed to start on his life’s work. I can’t say I fully vibed with Proust (and will explain all that in another post) but he does share this sense of laziness and missed opportunities with two authors I do love, Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne.
Samuel Johnson saw himself as a great slave to idleness, frequently berating himself for his laziness and beseeching God to forgive him for the times he has been idle and praying for strength and resilience to resist its bewitching allure. He saw laziness as a swamp that would suck him into greater vices - particularly those of masturbation and sexual fantasy. He found nothing productive in laziness, as Proust did and instead saw it as an insidious sucker of resolve and confidence, always undermining the best efforts of mankind in general and himself in particular.
Yet, despite this private disgust at his own laziness, Johnson called one of his projects The Idler and speaks of it in less fearful terms. He jokes about how easy it is to feel good about achieving some small successes as so many people are too lazy to do anything and says that those same people label anything that is merely impossible. As much as he hated it in himself, he did admit that laziness is one of the less vicious sins, as a truly lazy person is too lazy to do anything really heinous.
Montaigne also talks a lot about laziness. It’s clear that as a child, he was frequently castigated for his idle temper and says how the risk was not that he would do something bad, only that he would do nothing at all. The worry of his family was not that he would be an evil person, only a useless one.
Even as an older man he admits his soul is so lazy that he doesn’t measure his “fortune by its height but by its pleasantness.” However, Montaigne, being the self-accepting person that he is, has no problem with these priorities. By the end of his essays, having struggled through the forbidding notion that philosophy is about learning to die well, then as a way to live well, understands that it’s good enough to have lived at all.
I come back to one of my favourite quotes, from the last essay;
“What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done much today.’ - ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’"
How much happier Samuel Johnson would have been had he came to this conclusion. Even Proust has to justify his lazy, wasted years as grist for his mill and fodder for his book. We should all take those words of Montaigne to heart, accept that our lazy days are still days we have lived and that’s all that’s required of us in this life. And sometimes .. sometimes those lazy days are the ones where we produce the things that really last.
Like this terrible painting that could live on this wall for decades to come.
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