The Dream of being Idle
“Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work.” Or so the esteemed Lewis Thomson claimed. The 59th Street Bridge Song would appear to disagree with this, for it does not bother with explanations at all but sends a very clear message that seems obvious from its first line. The message ostensibly is this: “Slow down” and enjoy life, played to an easy, whimsical and calming tune. The later lines reiterate this, describing a dream-like state of idleness and well-being and ending with a benevolent “life I love you, always groovy”. These slogans from the swinging sixties sound perfectly reasonable. Yet what does ‘slowing down’ and ‘making the moment last’ really mean? We don’t need to be told to enjoy life and pursue happiness. The real question is how do we go about doing so? According to the 59th Street Bridge Song, the answer is by idling.It would seem that, according to popular culture today, the exact opposite is true. According to Mario Andretti, a renowned race driver, “it's the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal that will enable you to attain the success you seek”. John Lubbock is harsher, saying that “The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it.” Once admirably idle activities such as bantering, admiring scenery and staring at clouds have been labeled as “unproductive”. We have relegated them to the outhouses of our minds, and have denounced them as foolishness and idiocy. This is the legacy of the protestant work ethic. That every day of our life must wrung dry for every drop of efficiency and that idleness, as a rule, is at best useless, and at worse a dangerous sign of mental degeneracy. Idling is a thing to warn your child against, to shun and to repress.
Yet, despite conventional wisdom, and in defiance of ancient proverbs, there is a certain romanticism that has been attached to idleness. Although we achieve success through hard work, the reward we receive and indeed were striving for in the first place is idleness. This is similar to the dream of George and Lennie from John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”. They work at ranches in the hope that eventually they will own their own farm where they will spend their days tending rabbits and “live offa the fatta the land”. This is the myth of the American Dream, that if you put in enough effort, and have enough determination, you can earn a big pile of cash and retire young to enjoy life and be idle. Our symbols of success and enjoyment: week-long cruises in the pacific, golfing trips in Ireland, sun-bathing in Hawaii and early retirement. We have idealized idleness as the ultimate reward of our efforts.
Yet this reward never really materializes. How many aging retirees really do spend their ‘Golden years’ in flower shirts on the beaches of California? How many multi-millionaire CEOs really make a fortune and then quit and head off to Honolulu for a martini? Witness the example of business legends like Carl Icahn and Warren Buffet who are still actively involved with their businesses in their seventies. Charles Simmons warns us that “it is only the constant exertion and working of our sensitive, intellectual, moral, and physical machinery that keep us from rusting, and so becoming useless.” Thus, not only is it unthinkable to pursue idleness without first becoming a success, even after we have succeeded idleness is beyond our grasp. For sure, there are the privileged and pampered few who do indeed enjoy the fruits of (often someone else’s) hard labor. Yet their rarity confirms the general trend. The song of idleness has been drowned out by the overwhelming yawn of politically correct society. We have traded irreverent freedom for the dogmatic and all-consuming yoke of Materialism.
Thus, idleness has been divorced from reality. We strive to succeed in order to be idle and in order to be successful, we must cast aside idleness. After achieving success however, we raise the bar even higher, and thus still cannot be idle. To quote Mark Slouka, “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, you gotta work like a dog ‘til you die”. There is no room for idleness in reality; the only place left for it is our mind.
This brings us to the crux of this essay: if idleness cannot survive in reality, it must take refuge in our dreams. These dreams express themselves in every medium known to man. Our movies, our fiction, our artwork, our poetry, all of them contain slivers of the idle spirit, cracks in the cave of capitalism. Books like “On the Road” and music from the Beatles all allow us small snatches of idleness and we treasure and revere these snatches. These patches numb us to the price of our eternal bustle. They pacify our hidden hopes and dreams and let us escape from the ‘big and nasty world’. They are our gateway into the idyllic matrix of idleness that exists only in our imagination. We know that superheroes don’t exist, we know that you need more than love to survive, and we know that life is not “always groovy”, but we indulge in the song, and because of that fleeting moment, can carry on living our lives. We attempt to capture the spirit of idleness and portray it, and these counterfeits give us the sustenance we need to maintain our lives without the respite of idleness.
Lewis Thomson was indeed mistaken when he said that “music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work.” Similarly, Simon and Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song is not an advertisement for the wonders of idleness. Music is not explanation or an argument; it is an indicator, and a symbol of our hidden dreams and yearnings. The real message behind the song is that “we want to be idle”. It’s a pity we only think being idle is a dream.
By Jeremy Tan
Critique please!
So said Aerasio at 11:53
2 Comments:
Lightnin' Hopkins sang "You got to work to draw yo' pay", and we remember the great metaphor "Old Man River". The Beatles portrayed bustle in "A Day in the Life", and there are of course hundreds more, including Merle Haggard's "Working Man's Blues". In every one is buried the dream of rest.
Rest is mandatory. God rested on the seventh day from his labors, and he decreed a seventh day of rest for man. We need a vacation once in awhile, though in America many of us aren't so good at taking them.
I am one of those who worked very hard and now plan to retire early. Only I don't care for that word "retire", as it connotes retreat or surrender. My excitement is to move on to new endeavors that are more passionate and less draining, more meaningful and less necessary, more discretionary and less motivated by producing income. Endeavors that give back and make a difference.
There are many like me who are reaching their 50's and making such plans. I know many are not harboring dreams of end-to-end cruises and cocktails on the beach. These don't motivate me at all, and neither do they thrill numerous others I know well.
Where am I going with this? I saw a revealing comment in your post: "...there are the privileged and pampered few who do indeed enjoy the fruits of (often someone else’s) hard labor..."
There is a growing cultural resentment towards anyone who is successful. I believe this is closely tied to a creeping entitlement-ism and victim-ism that is a relatively recent feature of American thought. It is the result of entitlement policies, it is counter to reality, and counter to logic.
We live in a capitalist system in which free enterprise, innovation, risk-taking and investment are not just features, they are the driving force behind the fact that our standard of living - including that of our poor - exceeds the rest of the world by quite a large margin.
Those with ideas such as "successful people did it on the backs of the exploited workers", or "once these privileged ones make their batch, they retire to a life of endless mai tais on the beach in Waikiki", or "take more from 'the rich', they can afford it" indulge themselves in this crazy thinking.
I'm not sure any of this was the real point of your post, but it's the direction it took me.
Some will wind up on cruises and long reveries upon their retirements. Bu many will do what they have done throughout their careers - invent and build things scores of others will use, enjoy, make money from, build families on, and enjoy relatively high standards of living as the result of.
Sadly, those who benefit will complain about it and accuse those driving the ship of crimes against humanity. "Rich" is now a derogatory term in our culture. "Successful" is right behind it. It is both sad and illogical.
Firstly I am glad that you (whoever you are) made the effort to make such a long-winded reply to my post. Although the benevolence of your efforts are somewhat questionable in view of the contempt you seem to hold for my intellectual and logical capacities. One wonders if your purpose in dealing with someone so inferior to yourself is entirely selfless, or more to the point, is in fact so that you can feel good about being smart.
Regardless of however you feel about this, you do in fact make several errors in appraising my post. I will readily accept that it makes a few rather bold and unprovable assumptions that you have rightly pointed out. Namely, not everyone wishes to be idle. Yet you seem to believe that I advocate a socialist welfare state that encourages idleness. You also assume that I believe idleness is a universal virtue, when in fact my post has said nothing to that effect.
If one took the time to actually analyze what the post actually said. One would find no judgements about the nature of idleness or any attempt to establish ultimately what idleness even is. All the post was, was an attempt to describe the place of idleness in the psyche and collective consciousness of society today, with a special emphasis on society in my homeland of Singapore (though that is unstated).
You make the point that the rich and successful are punished by society because of the hateful envious nature of the have-nots. With the aid of this reply, it should be apparent that our two ideas have nothing at all in common. As you acknowledge, you are "not sure any of this was the real point of [my] post" and rightly so. Your rather barbed reply had little or nothing to do with my post in the first place. More responsible or attentive reading of what I actually said may have revealed this.
As for my view on your argument, if the 'rich and successful' haves are so resented by the poor have-nots, then why is it still the universal dream of almost every enterprising business man to get rich? Why do we look with such awe and admiration to figures like Warren Buffet and Donald Trump. For sure there may be some resentment, but it is the nature of the human that he envies those who have what he does not. In my opinion, this envy fuels competition and effort rather than detracts from it, and thus I would not hold their envy against them.
In any case, I hope you will take more care in analyzing what other people say in the future. I also opine that if you believe someone to be wrong or mistaken, you should be willing to come out into the open and say it in full honesty. Hiding behind the 'anonymous' title without providing an oppurtunity for future discourse is (in my honest opinion) a sign of intellectual weakness and cowardice. Be willing to argue your stance or accept correction, don't take it halfway.
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