American idle

The Idler’s Glossary is not for slackers

by JULIET WATERS

“Busy,” a friend informed me last week after I made the mistake of asking her how she was. “But I like being busy,” she continued blithely. “I’m more productive that way.” I’m not sure how vividly the horror registered on my face, but it was obvious enough that she felt compelled to say, “You don’t like being busy?”

Uh…no…. I’ve tried many times to wrap my mind around this idea of busyness as a good thing. I really have, honest. I have longed more than once to take my place among most of society. But it’s not going to happen. My soul continues to recoil from a world that feels to me polluted by unnecessary action.

I just don’t get it. How do busy people think? When do they have the time to take long contemplative walks? And most importantly, when do they read? How do they absorb the beauty of a great book? When you ask them what they’re busy at, why do they never ever reply, “I’m very busy reading great novels, and contemplating great art and continuing to work on the kind of exceptional book that usually takes about eight to 10 years to write.”

And so I am the ideal reader for The Idler’s Glossary. This is a useful little dictionary for unhurried people, compiled by Joshua Glenn, with a long enough introduction by Mark Kingwell to earn him co-authorship, and elegantly illustrated by Seth. I’m the kind of person who is thrilled to discover the word “otiose,” which comes from the Latin otium meaning leisure. Get this: the Latin word for business is negotium, which means not-leisured. Think about it. We live in a world where people are unambitious and unproductive. But once there was a world where people who did not see leisure as the obvious goal in life were relegated to the “un” category.

The Romans weren’t averse to work. They did build a pretty impressive civilization, even if it didn’t last. But it will not go down in history as the civilization that wrecked the planet with their blind, relentless “productivity.” For that matter, neither will we. If we continue on our path, there won’t be an awesome history book to preserve that infamy. Writing an awesome history book takes serious unhurried time. It is not a good occupation for people who like to be “busy.”

Here is where we attempt to refine our definition of the idler. This person is not a slacker, as Glenn points out: “Unlike the idler, in whom work and leisure have combined to become something fine, the slacker remains unhappily trapped on one side of that binary opposition.” As Dr. Johnson once put it a few centuries ago, idlers are not people who “exist in a state of unruffled stupidity, forgetting and forgotten; who have long ceased to live.”

And as Kingwell writes in his intro “the idler is not a cultural rebel, some buy-nothing-day refusenik. Nor is he an aesthete of his own sensibility, making experience of his singular life into a self-consumed work of art…. The idler is a much more comprehensive critic than is usually imagined, a dedicated overthrower of thought, not just culture or convention.”

I’m not entirely sure what Kingwell means by “overthrower of thought.” But I do at least have the time to fully realize my puzzlement. Idlers are not robotic consumers of half digested ideas. Maybe I’ll figure it out. Maybe I’ll decide it’s his attempt at humour. Maybe I’ll eventually even laugh.

One of the great pleasures of The Idler’s Glossary is there’s no hurry to read it or to understand just why there would be a glossary without an actual book that it refers to. Perhaps the definition of the idler can never be entirely refined. Like the Tao, perhaps the idler that can be named is not the true idler, and the work the idler completes, never the true work.

I’ll just have to think about that.

THE IDLER’S GLOSSARY BY JOSHUA
GLENN AND MARK KINGWELL, ILLUSTRATIONS
BY SETH, BIBLIOASIS, PB,
134 PP, $12.95