In Defense of Indolence

"What have you done all day?" he asked me.

"Nothing," I told him. "Nothing whatever."

"But why?" Relentlessly, he pursued his inquiries. "Why, when there is so much to do?"

"I had a presentiment that this was to be my last day on earth. I was anxious not to spoil it."

"I should have thought," he observed, "that on one's last day on earth, one would have to be particularly busy, tying up loose ends."

"But I didn't know for certain," I told him.

I allowed the conversation to lapse. In any case, I sensed he was no longer really interested. There is nothing to be gained by attempting to convert my fellow men, and everything to lose. If everyone did nothing, I might be forced to do something myself. Fortunately, it doesn't suit many to be idle. Most prefer to bite and scratch and follow their calling to within a few yards of the grave. The rhythm of work or play is not lightly broken. To give up requires an effort of will of which few are capable. But these few pass through a hidden door in the tapestry of life. They are concealed from their fellow players like victors in a game of (continued on page 290)In Defense of Indolence(continued from page 169) sardines, an English version of hide-and-seek; they wait in the closet, shivering with glee, with difficulty containing their excitement and their water. Now and again, another joins them in the dark, sworn to silence, abjured to remain motionless, lest their lair be discovered and the horde descend.

Very few of us. unfortunately, can play the game indefinitely. I myself achieve total indolence only occasionally and for pathetically short periods; but I persevere. Life, as I conceive it, finds me on the hook; the unseen and all-powerful angler reels me in inexorably. Struggling vainly to avoid the final confrontation at the pierhead. I find it comforting every now and then to play dead for short periods, to feign tranquillity, even perhaps to half persuade the one who holds the rod that I am no longer on the line. I permit myself to be drawn through the waters of life and pretend that I am floating with the current.

These days of indolence are never announced in advance, even to myself, still less to those who are anticipating visits, phone calls, letters. I will wake one morning to find perhaps the first snow on the ground, or the first blossom on the trees, or the last leaf fallen from the bough. I will wake to a feeling of nausea, or with a headache, or with a sense of unbelievable well-being; or perhaps I will simply oversleep and wake with the telephone ringing in my ear. Something will tell me not to answer; and as the bell gathers its momentum. I lose my own. My hand outstretched to lift the receiver falls back on the eider down. This is one of those days when I must last from activity.

My engagement to lunch with the Archbishop of Canterbury must be canceled, the dinner to be given for me by the Worshipful Company of Silversmiths postponed. My proposals for the abolition of chartered accountancy will not be available; my television confrontation with the prime minister cannot take place as scheduled. All over the country, all over the world, place cards are re-shuffled, air time is canceled, editors bite their nails. I regret the disappointments but, having dropped my spanner in the works, I remain unrepentant. Like the lunatic in the old story, I couldn't continue to pound my head against the wall if I didn't occasionally experience the bliss of desisting from such insane activity.

The pursuit and temporary capture of indolence has never presented me with a problem. I was something of a child prodigy where sloth was concerned. Not for me the polo mallet, the sliding seats of racing sculls, the vaulting horse in the gymnasium. It was not a matter of choice. I had no eye for a ball, no muscle for the parallel bars. Each term, I would flunk the physical-coordination test and be flogged by the house prefect. Nor was much admiration lavished on me by my schoolteachers. At an early age, I accepted the premise that my shape was not the kind most people admire nor my mind the sort that others covet. Yet I never lost faith. I thought of myself as an ill-wrapped parcel containing an elegant gold watch that only waited to be wound.

With scorn, I watched my contemporaries nurture their minds and exhaust their bodies, suffer mental breakdowns and dislocated shoulders, then wait disconsolately for noses to mend and cuts to heal, so that they could rush back into the mud and batter one another unconscious in a vain attempt to prove who was the better man. My idea of hell is still one vast locker room full of men changing from long pants to short, with rackets and clubs swinging around my ears.

In self-defense, I armed myself with the discouraging phrase, the snide comment, the insincere commiseration. I was not a popular child; nor, as one who has never been able to perceive the nobility of vulgar competition, was I a particularly healthy one. I have always preferred the civilized pleasures of the table to the crude exertions of the playing field. As a consequence, before every film engagement, I am forced to submit myself to one of those insurance examiners who must predict as best he can whether I am likely to survive long enough to complete my role in the picture. I am conditioned to jerk my leg spasmodically whenever my knee is struck with a hammer and to breathe deeply without giggling when a naked ear is applied to my back. And over the years, I have developed a special agility for leaping off examination couches that would do credit to men half my age. But all this avails me little. Indeed, the battle is lost before the examination begins. It is lost on the scales. Whether anyone ever succeeds in insuring me, I cannot tell; medicos are loath to disclose their verdicts, but on one point they are unanimous: I am grossly overweight.

It would seem that my magnificent body was originally designed to swing from branch to branch, hunting and consuming salads, with an occasional small rodent included for good measure. But nowadays. I seldom eat salads; and although I once helped consume a guinea pig when I was seven, the circumstances are altogether too gruesome to be mentioned in these pages. I do not like to brood over distressing experiences, which is why, having collected my hat and coat from the doctor's waiting room, I then neat myself to a feast of blinis stuffed with caviar. Next morning, only a twinge of indigestion will serve to remind me of the whole humiliating episode.

But corpulence is a small price to pay for a life of blessed leisure. Of all the gifts lavished upon me at my christening, indolence is the one for which I am most grateful. It has made life possible. It has prevented me from rushing in and rushing out, from fatiguing myself, from wasting time better spent in idle reverie and, above all, from realizing my ambitions. When I was a child, my mother often recounted the yokel's celebrated reply to an inquiry about what he did with his time. "Sometimes I sits and thinks, but mostly I just sits." Where my parent found humor, I found inspiration. I discovered that the easiest way to stop thinking was to stop breathing. Even today, people are apt to discover me sealed at my desk, my eyes closed, holding my breath.

"What on earth are you doing?" they ask.

"Nothing," I tell them. "Nothing at all."

In a way, I am something of a pioneer. I was practicing meditation before the Beatles were born. Life is a circular track; pause long enough in the rut and you will find, when you decide to join in again, that you are in the vanguard. I never cease to be astonished at the keenness displayed by the contestants, considering that no winning post exists.

I was fortunate to have been conceived by parents who held opposing views on almost all subjects. My father's métier was gambling; my mother's, the training of domestics. In a way, they complemented each other: My father ran out of money; my mother, out of cooks. Life thus became less hectic. And I learned a valuable lesson from my father's dedication to the track: that a man leaving his house every morning to go to work is not necessarily adding to the family fortune. Indeed, the daily breadwinner is seldom adequately compensated for the boredom and the monotony in inflicted on him by his chosen task. The knowledge that most men share his fate, that his wife wishes him out of the house, that it is too wet for golf, may occasionally encourage him to "tote dat barge, lift dat bale, get a little drunk and land in jail"; but one day his employers will find him dozing fitfully at his desk or drunk across the bar and, shaking him into semiwakefulness, will wring his limp paw and send him home for good.

Once, for a brief period, I myself abandoned the peace of the theater to venture into the maelstrom of business. I chose vacuum cleaners; or, to be more accurate, vacuum cleaners chose me. I was indoctrinated into the mystique of door-to-door selling by a high priest of salesmanship who so utterly convened me that I was willing to slave 12 hours a day for the cause. There was no petty crime that I did't eagerly practice, no dishonest approach I didn't cheerfully adopt. I became a phenomenon. I was congratulated, compensated and speedily promoted to the point where I led half a dozen disciples in and out of the parlors of British housewives, scattering domestic-hygiene appliances and collecting initial deposits. So drunk with power did I become that I even took to punishing intransigent homemakers who had not been receptive to my sales campaign; I would call on them in the middle of the night and harangue them on the doorstep until they became my customers at literally the eleventh hour.

Then one day I suddenly resigned my commission; my faithful troops paraded on without their commanding officer. I accepted the role of a butler in a London play titled Up in the Air. No one could think of a better title during the three nights the play ran. Despite this inauspicious return to the theater, I was not tempted to re-enter the world of demon business. I had strayed from the path, seen the error of my ways and taken the pledge: Why charge up and down suburban side streets, when you can earn more sitting about and talking on a stage? Nowadays, when confronted with an ailing vacuum cleaner, I feign ignorance; and if my wife reminds me of that shameful interlude from my callow youth, I blush and leave the room. I am not ashamed that I was once a vacuum-cleaner salesman, only that I was a good vacuum-cleaner salesman.

It is fortunate that I learned early in life that every man carries in his briefcase the seeds of his own destruction. If he should unwittingly plant a beanstalk outside his office window, he is well advised to change offices before the damn thing obscures his view--and the pot of gold at the top entices him to climb. How grateful I am that, halfway to the top, I managed to jump off.

But I feel I am being something of a hypocrite even by setting these words on paper. When Playboy invited me to extol the virtues of indolence. I was sorely tempted to leave the pages of the manuscript blank. One can honor a virtue no more fittingly than by practicing it--which is why, I suppose, so few essays in praise of doing nothing have been written, while library shelves groan under the weight of volumes admonishing us to do-it-yourself. How marvelously I would have enjoyed the Elizabethan Age, when--for the rich, at any rate--the mere business of getting up in the morning involved an unconscionable expenditure of effort. In those days, a nobleman such as I would have been awakened with reverence and cushioned against further exertion; then tea would have been poured for me, and slices of gossamer bread and butter proffered by a servant who waited by the bedside, ready to draw his master's bath; then a barber would have shaved me and a valet dressed me, tying my shoelaces, knotting my tie, fastening my buttons; and there would have been a parlormaid to iron my newspaper and place it in my hand. There would also have been someone to wind the clocks and see that they kept time. "Time for what?" you may ask. In such circumstances, what could the recipient of all these favors do for himself? Very little; but how pleasant it would have been to sit in peace at the center of such a domestic whirlwind.

Times have changed, lamentably, but it is still possible to organize others to perform the simple tasks necessary for one's comfort. One should be careful, however, never to watch those tasks being carried out and discover for one-self how they are performed. Learn a language and you will spend your life translating sentences for others. Know how to change a fuse and much of your time will be spent on stepladders. When the lights fail, I wait happily in the dark while someone else repairs them. When taps drip, I adjust to their rhythm until the plumber arrives. Nor have I ever looked under the hood of a motorcar--or even opened the trunk--lest I become familiar with the workings of an internal-combustion engine or discover a piece of equipment that might enable me to change a flat. I did learn to ride a bicycle, but it was my governess who patched the punctures. The world, luckily, is full of amateur electricians, plumbers, busybodies and part-time firemen. The organizers of civil-defense exercises admit that their greatest problem is to recruit not the helpers but the victims.

I belong to that select few who consider it our duty to provide the naturally energetic with outlets for their exuberance. We give the strong something to lift; we furnish the diligent with simple tasks. I make a point, for example, of never looking at my own watch if there is someone beside me who can be induced to consult his. I am always on the lookout for new ways of employing my fellow creatures. A journey for me is no longer simply a matter of getting someone to buy me a ticket, another to pack my bags and a third to drive me to the airport. Nowadays, I insist on a volunteer to push a wheelchair from the car to the plane. Ever since I broke my ankle and discovered how much pleasanter it is to be trundled rather than shepherded along endless airport corridors, I have insisted on propulsion. Once inside, I don't mind where I sit, as long as I have first pick--which I always do, since I'm invariably ushered aboard as an invalid ahead of the other passengers. Moreover, once I'm settled comfortably, the other passengers, observing my plight, tend to diagnose my condition as heart trouble and are not eager to crowd the row, for fear that they may be called upon in an emergency to provide me with the kiss of life. Thus, at an early stage in the journey, I am able to wrench out the arms of the adjacent seats and spread out.

On the ground, as well as in the air, a reputation for indolence has to be carefully sown and cultivated; but once established, it looks after itself and is instantly recognized for what it is. Indolents are not expected to be tidy or, indeed, even to greet their girlfriends by standing. And if the latter desire to be kissed when taking their leave, it is they who must bend down and proffer the cheek or, occasionally, the lips; a surge of passion is always more appreciated when it is unexpected.

The late Sir Winston Churchill never captured my attention so completely as when he confessed to never standing if he could sit and never sitting if he could lie down. It is for this reason that I make use of the floor as much as possible, not only for my own person but for general clutter. "I see you prefer the big shelf." a pedant once chided me. It was some time before I understood that he was eager for me to pick up some article of clothing that I had blithely discarded at my feet. His phrase was to linger in my memory and has been a source of inspiration. I find peace and satisfaction nowadays in allowing newspapers to fall from my hand. Magazines, books, spectacle cases, telephone directories, the telephone itself, an occasional glass of madeira, an empty plate, my typewriter and miscellaneous letters and sheets of manuscript lie on the carpet, bearing witness to where the great eagle has nested.

Indeed, the pages you have just read were retrieved a few minutes ago from beneath a box of chocolates by a compulsively neat butler, where they had reposed, untouched and unremembered, for several happy months. After a herculean ordeal of creative ferment, the Muse--and my limited attention span--had mercifully deserted me. Neither has returned as I write--or, rather, dictate--these words; but they will have to suffice, for it has become even more tiresome to receive increasingly shrill dunning letters from my frenetic editor at Playboy than to postpone any longer the completion of this enervating project.

Perhaps only the indolent would find these halfhearted disclaimers satisfactory as a conclusion for this gemlike essay; but a truly indolent man would never have bothered to read this far in the first place. So perhaps it is my destiny to be misunderstood. In any case, it seems to me that my subject--and my sincerity in singing its praises--could receive no higher tribute than my inability to muster sufficient energy to finish....