Had he been around today, the author of the 1889 classic, Three Men in a Boat (Not to Mention the Dog), could well have been a contender in Montenegro’s annual ‘Laziest Citizen’ contest held in September, in which competitors lie on mattresses, a prize of the equivalent of $1,000 going to the person who can remain supine the longest.
Sitting up or standing is not allowed. But the contestants are permitted a 10-minute loo break every eight hours. Participants may also read or listen to music to while away the idle hours, which, in the case of the winner of this year’s contest, stretched to an impressive 117 minutes, a feat of admirable perseverance.
The Bible exhorts the faithful to behold the lilies of the field, which neither toil nor spin, yet not even Solomon, in all his glory, is arrayed like them, an observation which may have inspired the Left-wing Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich to formulate the ideas in his 1978 treatise, The Right to Useful Unemployment.
In a neo-Marxist take on the Communist Manifesto urging, ‘Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains,’ Illich decried what he called ‘the commodification’ of labour, whereby the value of work is judged only by the amount of money earned by doing it. This puts the horse of creativity and community service behind the cart of capitalist evaluation, turning workers not just into wage slaves, but into slaves of meaningless labour.
Freed from the shackles of enforced employment, the idle mind could become a devilishly productive workshop, which creates the Marxist ‘superstructure’ of cultural accomplishment, a view endorsed millennia ago by Aristotle, who also observed that the cultivated individual may learn to play a musical instrument, but not too well, lest he become a mere musician. As a forerunner to EM Forster’s gentle deprecation of the ‘busy-ness’ life of ‘taxis and telegrams’, Friedrich Nietzsche voiced a stern caveat against excess activity: ‘Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbour the greatest weariness, their restlessness is a weakness – they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness… [which] is the parent of psychology’, an assertion which might explicate the centrality of the somnolence-inducing couch in Freudian psychoanalysis.Literary lore has it that when Marlene Dietrich was amid career doldrums, she phoned her confidant, Ernest Hemingway, to ask if she should accept a pedestrian role because doing something was better than doing nothing. With characteristic terseness, Papa replied, ‘Don’t confuse movement for action’, and hung up. The legendary actress turned down the role and went on to greater glory.
Hemingway’s advice regarding needless mobility finds an echo in the advice to restive youth given by a character in a Herman Hesse novel: ‘Movement creates obstacles’, a notion that chimes with Charlie Brown’s conclusion that there is no problem so big that you can’t walk away from it. Or go to sleep on it.
Importuned by a young dramatist to attend a performance of his play and give his opinion of it, George Bernard Shaw agreed to do so. The play over, its writer remonstrated with Shaw that he’d asked for the famous author’s opinion, while the invitee had been caught napping during the performance. The Shavian response to this accusation was, ‘Sleep is an opinion.’
As in the case of Shaw, the less said, the better was also the unspoken credo of the 30th US president Calvin ‘Silent Cal’ Coolidge, who was famed for his signature taciturnity. When a socialite seated next to him at a formal dinner confided that she had taken a bet that she could get the laconic president to speak at least three words, Coolidge replied, ‘You lose.’
