Farewell to the Working Class (Page 2)

In this climate, Tom Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle is a welcome cry for more time off. A young Englishman who edits a journal called The Idler, he is straightforward about his utopian aims: "I have a dream," he writes. "It is called love, anarchy, freedom. It is called being idle." Indebted to his forefathers, he quotes Paul Lafargue and Bertrand Russell at length. He even steals (as any slacker would) Lafargue's epigraph, from German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: "Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy." Such exceptions are the rule of the book. Hodgkinson insists that a commitment to leisure is essential to our spiritual and social well-being, and his enlightened state includes a strict regimen of sleeping and getting drunk.

How to Be Idle is more of an anecdotal self-help book (or anti-self-help book) than a sustained argument. "If you want health, wealth, and happiness, the first step is to throw away your alarm clocks!" Hodgkinson writes. Personal stories and friendly advice follow. He urges us to enjoy our hangovers (he assumes we are always hung over) and to drink tea and not coffee. "Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics." At one point he even tells us where to buy our furniture (thrift stores, auctions and, of course, eBay).

The book is stitched together loosely, with each chapter corresponding to an hour of the day ("3 p.m.: The Nap" and "2 a.m.: The Art of Conversation") and liberally sprinkled with the wisdom of a diverse crew of loafers, from Wilde and Nietzsche to Debbie Harry and Spinal Tap. He, like Lafargue, blames the captains of industry for sanctifying labor: "The great problem of the Industrial Revolution," he writes, "was how to transform a population of strong-willed, independent-minded, heavy-drinking, party-oriented, riot-loving, life-loving Englishmen into a docile, disciplined, grateful workforce."

Hodgkinson is most entertaining--and convincing--when he's on a tirade. He rails against Thomas Edison ("After Edison, the machines never rested"), celebrates long aimless walks ("The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings....he wanders detached, wise and merry, godlike. He is free") and discourages readers from dousing symptoms with pharmaceuticals in order to carry on, still sick, with work. "Drug companies," he writes, "make vast profits out of magic beans which promise to deliver us from torment and return us to the desk." Hodgkinson would like instead to bring back the word "convalescence." He suggests that physicians should prescribe long periods of rest--anywhere from three days to two months--for minor illnesses. "Doctors, join us!" he writes. "I call on you! You are servants of the work ethic!"

He is on familiar terms with the figures of high culture he quotes. German critic Walter Benjamin is "one of the great literary Euro-slackers of the early twentieth century"; René Descartes, he tells us, was an incorrigible late-sleeper. When studying with the Jesuits, his tutors would douse him with buckets of cold water--to no effect. Hodgkinson wisely attributes Descartes's philosophical inventiveness to his time lying prone. "Laziness produced Cartesian duality," he writes. Then he adds, "I lie in bed thinking, therefore I am."

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