More leisure

Following on from yesterday's post on Leisure; as we return from the summer holidays, we hope, refreshed, we can still ask whether our "time out" has always been really leisure, as the Ancients understood it. How often we find ourselves restless, even fretful, in our leisure time. Even in holiday activities we often strain for something not before us, feel a lack as our minds wander and hanker in dissatisfaction.

Interestingly, the Greek word for leisure is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The name for the institutions of education and learning means "leisure". That surely gives food for thought.

Here are a couple of quotations from Joseph Pieper's work Leisure, The Basis of Culture, mentioned in the BBC recording posted yesterday:

Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go, and "go under", almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go (you cannot sleep unless you do so). And in fact, mutually related, just so the man at leisure is related to someone sleeping; as Heraclitus said of those who sleep, that they are "active and cooperative in the business of the world". The surge of new life that flows out to us when we give ourselves to the contemplation of a blossoming rose, a sleeping child, or of a divine mystery - is this not like the surge of life that comes from deep, dreamless sleep? 

And finally:

...against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as effort, leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. This inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating [Der Feiernde] belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure [as does that incomparable German word for "quitting time" or "festival-evening", Feierabend]. Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself [whereas idleness is rooted in the denial of this harmony], but also that he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their onenness.

Bonne rentrée!