How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Idleness is really a driving force for me, personally, that lets me decide upon my future endeavours. I enjoy wasting time during vacation time - doing absolutely nothing - and let myself wear out of idleness so much that post-vacation Me is willing to go all-in until the next vacation.

A long time back I read this funny, yet insightful book call How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. I have previously written a post called On Idleness which had excerpts from the book from famous writers in the past. This one has some paragraphs from the author’s lazy mind.

Noon: The Hangover

I first realized that there might be a new way to deal with the hangover when the American writer Josh Glenn contributed a piece on the subject to the Idler. He argued that the hungover state can lead to a fascinating sharpening of the senses:

“The hungover person is abnormally aware of sights, sounds, (everything sounds TOO LOUD!), tastes, odours, and textures which normally would go unremarked. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. The hungover eye, for instance, because it is neither obstructed by the blinkers of our everyday biases, nor deceived by intoxicated hallucinations, is magnetically attracted to seemingly ordinary objects which take on an incredible, luminous significance: Anyone who has ever experienced the ‘stares’ when hungover knows exactly what I mean."

Josh takes this argument yet further. He claims that the hangover can even act as a portal to a visionary state:

“Although the sudden awareness of the sacred in the mundane is what most religious traditions refer to as Nirvana, or some type of grace, we too often shrug off these moments in our haste to get rid of our hangovers. (I suspect, actually the hungover eye which somehow between the appraising eye of the teetotaler, the foggy eye of the drunkard, may be the model for Hinduism’s ‘Third Eye’ of enlightment). Thus it is that the moment of the hangover can propel us into a ‘middle state’ of perceptivity quite unlike anything we’re every likely to experience outside a monastery."

I wonder if (William) Blake was hungover when he saw the universe in a grain of sand?

1 PM: The Death of Lunch

In the UK & in the United States, idlers have witnessed with horror the rise of the Starbucks-style coffee shop, which is where many of the twenty-first century have little or nothing in common with the coffee shops of the eighteenth century, which were loafing centres par excellence, serving vast bowls of alcoholic punch and existing to facilitate convivial exchanges. The modern Costas & Starbucks have as their secret mission purely useful goals: give you strong coffee and some bread to help you survive the day in a state of high anxiety and fear. They give off the unpleasant aroma of efficiency.

Midnight: The Moon & The Stars

We feel small under the stars, yet paradoxically we feel more ourselves we are who we are.

The stars are everywhere in our language. We even call out celebrities ‘stars’, which symbolically elevates them to the level of Gods. Indeed, today’s celebrity culture has something in common with the cleistic culture of ancient Rome. The Romans looked up to their gods, but also loved to write and talk about their fallibilities and scandals. The gods, were above ordinary mortals, but were subject to baser instincts, too. How different from the infallible Christian mono-god, who is perfectly faultless to an extent that ust makes us feel guilty. It’s no wonder we love reading about celebrity divorces and drug problems in newspapers and magazines: we envy them, but we love to see in their behaviour our own weaknesses. In the early twentieth century and before, this role was fulfilled by the aristocracy; it was they who somehow seemed to be above the level of ordinary mortals, and it was their doings, their bad behaviours, love affairs & bankruptcies, that were chronicled in the gossip columns of newspapers and magazines.

It is the same old question: ‘What sort of creature is man? Is he noble & godlike or a sniffling beast imprisoned by base desires?'

5 AM: Sleep

The great idlers of the time such as Oscar Wilde and Paul Lafargue had a vision of technology as freeing of man from toil. Wilde, in the ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, wrote: “Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything, that is tedious and distressing.” Lafargue, in ‘The Right to be Lazy’, wrote that “the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisures & liberty."

Edison, on the other hand, saw technology as a tool to increase productivity and efficiency. He used technology to enslave. The fact that he is portrayed as a great man, a paragon of American industriousness, tells us much about the decay of Western Civilization in its journey from art and life to work and death.