Idle Thoughts of an Idle Feaster

Growing up, one of the constant refrains from people around me was “stop day dreaming” or “you’ve taken a walk in the clouds again”. I wish I had read Bertrand Russell in my childhood. To be idle is to have a contemplative habit of mind, he said, whereby we become playful and gain knowledge for itself.

To contemplate the art of being idle, of pottering around, drinking a tall glass of ice cold buttermilk or lemon soda, and nibbling on a cold grapefruit and hot peanut salad (I know it is not the season for grapefruit in Delhi but one can dream), seems an apt subject for the long hot summer.

What does all this have to do with food, you might ask.

A lot. Idleness is food for the brain. It helps us achieve the ‘eureka moment’ by allowing what Virginia Woolf calls the ‘submerged truth’ to come to the top.

‘Eschew idleness,’ cry out captains of industry and an army of ‘how to’ books. A healthy and ambitious person should be busy: that is, labouring in an office, attending meetings, and taking home a pay cheque. After all, the dictionary defines idleness as not working or in use, lazy, and not earning money. To be busy is a virtue for all ‘Good Housekeeping’ tracts through the ages. We all have either experienced or know someone who is constantly manufacturing work for the labouring classes because of the strongly held belief that idle hands and an idle mind are a devil’s workshop. And these days, in a recession-hit world, those of us who have jobs seem to belong to this class.

There is also a gendered subtext to idleness. A ‘housewife’ is considered to be idle and not on par with a woman who goes out and ‘works’. Even if one ‘works’ out of one’s home, and these days many organisations allow their employees to do so, the general attitude is that being at home means one is not really working.

This view of a woman would have been unthinkable in the Middle Ages. A survey of my bookshelves yielded these titles of books and chapters about good housekeeping, past and present. The Well Kept Kitchen, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and her The Campaign for Domestic Happiness (a home should be run like a military campaign), and Martha Steward’s Homekeeping Handbook : The Essential Guide to Caring for Everything in Your Home (caring for things sounds like an awful lot of work).

I dipped into The Well Kept Kitchen written by Gervase Markham, a poet and writer for housewives in 1615. Among other virtues to be possessed by a housewife, he lists untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein (no sermons!), sharp and quick of speech but not bitter or talkative (no nagging or chattering!), and generally skillful in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation. The first chapter’s title is ‘The outward and active knowledge of the housewife’ and speaks of the necessity of developing skills in cookery with flesh, fish, sauces, pastry, banqueting and great feasts. She has to be a good gardener and know the time of the year, month, and, let’s not forget the moon, in which all herbs are to be sown. She also has to know how to preserve and cure meats, and wine and brew beer—strong and light. And of course, prepare the oats and whatnot to feed the chickens and goats and sheep and the rest of the poultry and other beasts. Phew! Imagine the ceaseless activity the paragon he describes would have had to undertake to attain these virtues. These paragons of housewives did and do exist even today but are little appreciated for their skills and toil.

But Markham and the others have gotten it wrong in emphasising a cult of efficiency. It is precisely when one has a lot to do that one can enjoy being idle. Jerome K Jerome in The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow has it right. It is impossible, he says, to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. ‘There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one…When I like to dawdle longest over my dinner is when I have a heavy evening’s work before me. And if, for some urgent reason, I ought to be up particularly early in the morning, it is then, more than at any other time, that I love to lie an extra half- hour in bed.’ Sounds familiar? If it doesn’t then you had better change your habits.

Philosophers who prized idleness did not define it as sloth or dullness of the mind. Quite the contrary. Idleness, as Robert Louis Stevenson says in An Apology for Idlers, does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class or society. Contrary to the dictionary meaning of the term, idleness is not opposed to hard work. Eureka moments come precisely when we let our minds relax. Archimedes had his moment when he was in the bath, and if popular lore is correct, Newton, while daydreaming under an apple tree. Alexandre Dumas said that in order to plan his novel, he lay silent on his back for two days on the deck of a yacht in a Mediterranean port. At the end of the two days, he got up and called for dinner. He had created his plot, and the world read The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and his other masterpieces.

What are the essential qualities of idleness? Life should be savoured, not endured—that is the motto of a true idler. This does not mean that we do not work to earn money. What it means is that we stop doing, and potter. To potter—to move about without hurrying in a relaxed and pleasant way. To doodle, fribble, goof around, kick around, or putter. That could mean sitting and drinking with friends, or just looking out of the window at gulmohar flowers or squirrels running on electric wires (though these days the squirrels have stopped that mode of travel because the crows push them off and pounce on them—I saw it happen) or watching the dough of the bread rise (as bread makers know, you have to proof it twice). Idling means we do not use all our free time during weekends to do chores— answering emails (the bane of all creativity; idlers switch off the internet on weekends), running errands, ferrying our children to activities. Sundays, after all, were supposed to be for pottering around. Orthodox Jews still conform to the religious diktat of not doing anything on Sabbath, which includes a ban on switching on the light. Why not make some part of a working day a Sunday? Tom Hodgkinson in How to be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto extols the virtues of reading poetry in bed in the morning without feeling guilty about not jumping out and rushing off to do yoga or jogging or to the office.

You may ask for what purpose should one be idle? Wrong question. There is no instrumentality in idleness. One just is. As Robert Louis Stevenson says, extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, while a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

But it is very hard to be idle. Most of us are what Stevenson calls ‘dead-alive, hackneyed people’ who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Extreme busyness is because we feel that sitting still means being bored. But just visit an internet chat room and you’ll find posts from office goers saying ‘bored’, ‘boring’ or ‘yawn’. To boost productivity, companies organise outings to pubs and retreats—but that is not the kind of leisure one needs to be idle. These trips to Amby Valley or Neemrana require more performance from the employee in group interactions, games and conversations, and more hanging around airport terminals or in buses. Worse, these outings are organised during weekends, cutting into the only slack time for an employee. The orchestration of leisure becomes a means to an end, which is to boost productivity and lower the attrition rate. But a company may find that employees are more productive when they are allowed to work for shorter hours and given time to be idle. We need fewer bonding sessions with colleagues with whom one spends far too much time already in 12-hour workdays.

Tom Hodgkinson’s The Freedom Manifesto tells us how to create that space where we just are. Play the ukulele, throw away your watch and the telly—these are some of his suggestions. Not such bad ideas. By the way, watching the news channels on TV does not really count as idling because it requires effort at least on the part of one’s hearing, given the shouting heads on Indian news channels these days.

Idlers of the World, Unite! You have little to lose but your yawns. For those who are ‘at home’ for the holidays, make sure there are plenty of chores, and then sit back and don’t do them. Potter around, dream and be idle.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes