It was a love at first sight, that warm day of June 2006. I was wasting time at FNAC in the centre of Milan, after my final high school exam and I was searching for books for my summer, before leaving for Greece.  I’ve stumbled upon this book and it became my personal Bible: finally a book for a bon vivant like me!

How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto

So now it’s time for a quick review of “How to be Idle” by Tom Hodgkinson and some random thoughts about the whole issue. Tom Hodgkinson is a British Bohemien, journalist and writer, he’s living his life in a contry house somewhere in UK and he’s following his ideals of freedom from the slavery of 9-5 job. He’s publishing a magazine, called “The Idler”

The book is structured in chapters (really?), each one about a different hour of the day and to each hour is associated an idle pleasure or activity: the idea is to trace the line of an ideal idle day for work- consumed people. For example: 8 am is about waking up and refusing to leave the bed. According to the author, this is the first step of the idle revolution. 11 am is “Taking a pause” and it’s an hymn to the sweet pleasures of doing nothing when all the normal people are “running, living a fast and meaningless life, made by meeting, power point presentations” (I’m expressing the author’s opinion, since my life is made also by meeting and power point preso). There’s a nice except by Stevenson’s “An Apology for Idlers” that, if I remember well, is something like:

“It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in youth (…)If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class (…) but though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is?

12 pm it’s the moment of enjoying lunch, a pleasure that it’s often sacrified to productivity (Gordon Gekko: “Lunch is for wimps” Wall Street, 1987, one of the best movies about yuppie’s culture). 3 pm is the perfect time for a quick siesta (”Sleeping is like let yourself go into the arms of a secret lover”) and soon after the pleasure of sleeping, the tea.

What are the ideal activities of an idler? Smoking, drinking, fishing, staring the stars, making love, learning the art of fine conversation with smart friends, planning riots against the system (riots that will fail, since the idler is not active), dancing, meditating…

Living a life like this is for sure utopistic but I like the idea of taking some time for myself, thinking and enjoying the pleasures of this life…after all, there are few things that are certains in life, and death is one of those. But also death, could be seen like the supreme form of idleness.

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