Mario Lopez (Anthropology)
Last year, I took a short sabbatical leave, which gave me a rare opportunity to hit the pause button to rediscover the virtue of idleness. I returned to my home country, the U.K. and experienced the autumn for the first time in twenty-four years—something that I had been relishing for many years. During my brief time at home, I wandered and explored places that I had not visited before and used the time to reacquaint myself with old friends and books that I hadn’t read in many years.
One book I stumbled across Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Be Idle. Originally published in 2005, at the time, the book was an international hit, touching a public nerve on the art of idling time away. Chapters are divided into 24 hours starting with 8 am and takes us through a history (mainly Western) that ruminates on our ever-shifting relationship to work and leisure. At the heart of the book is a critique of liberal consumer capitalism and a clarion call to adopt a different position to life and make it more enjoyable and fulfilling. The book is a kind of manifesto asking us to rethink how we live our lives. The timing of re-encountering this book while on sabbatical unexpectedly provided me with the perfect excuse to explore a history of idleness. Now, I will confess and admit that—as with so many others—I have been inculcated into a work ethic that I really should be countering. Contemporary academia at a Japanese university consists of juggling multiple projects, teaching as well as managing connections and relationships across different time zones and languages not to mention the perpetual demand to publish on a yearly basis. Idling doesn’t come easily. However, in the English language, we can deploy a ridiculously vast array of ways to talk about slacking off with both with positive and negative connotations. We can laze about, lounge, loiter, idle, dawdle, while away (time), slack off, and in more slang terms, veg out and chill out.
Yet when philosophers start to muse on the act (and techniques) of loafing it can come to take on a life of its own. At different points in history discussions on idleness have placed emphasis on withdrawal and stillness. During the Renaissance, philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) argued for a more reflective, leisurely mind to counter a growing obsession with utility. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued for resisting the universality of labour and activity and the capitalism economic order that emerged. In the early industrial period, the American philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), sitting on the dooryard of his cabin mused on idleness as an aesthetic and moral stance, as “rapt in a revery, in undisturbed solitude and stillness” (Thoreau 1983).
Hodgkinson’s book took me down a pleasant rabbit hole to ruminate on the hidden virtues of idleness, but at the end of the day, it feels like a book written in English for English speakers resting upon a long tradition of the privileged explaining the need to slack off. Yet, it got me thinking about the ambiguous ways idleness is reflected upon in Japanese. There are, in fact, several important classical works born from the Sinitic tradition of meditating on idleness. Hōjōki (方丈記) by Kamo no Chōmei (鴨長明, 1155–1216) is a brief account of a man who takes the tonsure and retreats to a tiny hut on the outskirts of Kyoto. Here, idleness takes the form of a radical stepping back from society—a reclusive life (Tonsei 遁世) of renunciation as an anti-worldly act: leaving the capital, abandoning career and social obligations, and downsizing one’s life both physically and spiritually. It is, in a way this encapsulates the ultimate early medieval minimalist movement.
Another widely known work is Tsurezuregusa (徒然草, Essays in Idleness) by Yoshida Kenkō (兼好, 1283–1352), a former courtier and priest. He lets his mind wander freely, and from this drifting arises a heightened sense of aware, a sensitivity to the pathos of things. His “following the brush” style (Zuihitsu 随筆) is the literary embodiment of idle drifting. In Kenkō’s world, not being bound to time allows for us to dwell on the fleeting charm of aesthetic ideals and to transform those idle musings into prose. One might say he elevated “killing time” into a sublime yet serious cultural activity.
Contemporary Japanese literature is also scattered with authors who feel compelled to share what idleness means in their everyday lives. The novelist Umezaki Haruo (梅崎春生, 1915–65）famously wrote a short collection of essays titled “on the Virtues of Laziness (『怠惰の美徳』), in which—often in a gently self-deprecating tone—he turns his own idleness into a ground-level reflection on postwar Japanese society. It is armchair—or better said—futon based ethnographic insights into laziness. And if we burrow further into the rabbit hole, we find an entire cluster of Japanese characters used to categorize and classify different types of idleness and laziness. I have tried to map these across a spectrum that runs from laziness to loafing to idleness.
Firstly, at one end of the spectrum we have pure laziness under taida (怠惰) or laziness as a moral failing, close to the modern English sense of indolence. Then there is laziness mixed with weakness in 惰弱 (dajaku) a kind of born of laziness, and damin (惰眠) “lazy sleep,” implying that one has not just dozed off, but done so in a manner that is morally questionable. Moving toward loafing, we encounter kenda (倦惰) suggestive of ennui or bored idleness, and my personal favourite, yūda (遊惰) which we might translate as “playful loafing,” “recreational slackness” or perhaps leisure with mild guilt. Between loafing and more neutral forms of idleness we can place dasei (惰性) inertia—simply coasting along and neither virtuous nor condemnable. Finally, at the more elevated end of the spectrum, we find idleness as a kind of contemplative leisure, captured by terms such as yūyū (悠々) an easy, unhurried spaciousness of time, and seikan (清閑) a serene, quiet idleness. Here, doing nothing becomes almost a moral and aesthetic vocation.
But, you’d be hard-pressed to find these elevated forms of language used outside of literature. Where the Japanese excel at capturing the spirit of loafing is in their prodigious use of onomatopoeia in everyday life—sounds describing movements, moods and mental states. These expressions open an entire expressive world of idleness: daradara (だらだら) and gūtara (ぐうたら) evoke a sluggish lazy mood; udauda (うだうだ) conveys dawdling and a sense of things dragging out; buraburai (ぶらぶら) and urouro (うろうろ) perfectly capture loafing around; and yurayura (ゆらゆら) suggests a gentle swaying. And finally, we reach idleness with nonbiri (のんびり), yuttari (ゆったり), yukkuri (ゆっくり) and bonyari (ぼんやり). The last of these sits between loafing and idleness but leans toward a more contemplative, spaced-out form of daydreaming- rather than aimless laziness.
Hodgkinson’s book aims to celebrate laziness and introduce us to the great idler thinkers in history. But putting intellectual musings to one side, the simple act of wandering aimlessly through languages can enrich how we slack off in different cultural spheres. Why loaf in just one linguistic tradition when you can do so in several?
Postscript
I should, of course, have submitted this reflection a year ago. But due to my own meandering digressions into the history of the virtues of laziness, I can only apologize to the editors for my failure to meet the deadline. I was simply immersing myself—perhaps too fully—in the subject at hand.
References
Hodgkinson, Tom. 2005. How to Be Idle. Penguin, 2005.
Thoreau, Henry David. 1983. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Edited by Owen Thomas. New York: Penguin Classics.
簗瀬一雄訳注、鴨長明『方丈記 現代語訳付き』角川ソフィア文庫、2010年
小川剛生訳注、兼好法師『新版 徒然草 現代語訳付き』角川ソフィア文庫、2015年
梅崎春生著、荻原魚雷編『怠惰の美徳』中公文庫、2018年
(Illustration: Atelier Epocha)
This article is also available in Japanese. >>
「怠惰礼賛」（マリオ・ロペズ）
