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When I was a secondary school student in the 1970s, I came across an essay with the title In Praise of Idleness.
I can remember nothing at all about the essay, and may indeed have been so impressed by its title that I never bothered to read it.
The classrooms in my school – Coláiste Mhuire, then on Dublin’s Parnell Square – had high sash windows.
If you got a good seat beside both a radiator and a window, you could comfortably while away the day looking up at the clouds, or down at the passing traffic, while the good teacher at the top of the room droned on about something or other.
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The Christian Brothers, who ran the scoil lán Gaeilge, were doctrinaire adherents to the view that idleness was an invitation to the devil. I wasn’t prone to strong views, but I fundamentally disagreed with them on that. It was my experience that staring out the window while daydreaming, or thinking about absolutely nothing, had great spiritual charm.
I might say in my defence that despite going to an Irish-speaking school, I never really got the hang of the language, which I found maddeningly difficult. So even if I’d listened to the teachers, I probably wouldn’t have learned much.
For me, the attractions of idleness were part and parcel of my love of reading. I don’t mean to imply that reading is a form of idleness.
It is just that in my case the practice of the former encouraged indulgence in the latter.
Idleness allowed a return to the interior world opened up by books. They both had the same texture.
And it wasn’t that I was trying to escape from anything, or hide from the “real” world.
It was simply that I found idleness, or watching double-decker buses go by, to be more enriching than, say, learning the three main industries of every county in the Republic, or mastering the tuiseal ginideach.
If every life has an arc, then my early life went from a hardback book about the native tribes of North America, to the Billy Bunter books, the Nancy Drew mysteries, then on to cowboy books (especially those written by the wonderful Zane Grey), and finally, of course, to reading the (mostly short) plays of Samuel Beckett, with all of this material feeding into the attractions of spending hours on end doing absolutely zilch. Not even waiting for Godot.
My early training in idleness stood me in good stead when I got to my twenties. Whole days could pass and if I was asked, as the sun set, what did you do today, I’d have been flummoxed. I almost made it through to my thirties without getting snagged by proper employment or, in truth, taking much notice of what the rest of the world was up to. Even when I got my first real job, it was as a reporter for the Irish Press, where the four seven-hour shifts a week still left lots of time for my main interest in life.
By the mid- to late-1990s, however, my talent for idleness began to lose its bloom. I’m not sure whether this was linked to Ireland emerging from its position as “the poorest of the rich”, as the Economist once said about us, or whether it is just a natural process that afflicts the members of every generation.
The deterioration continued apace through the first two decades of the 21st century, and I have now reached a level of disintegration where I actually like to get up early in the morning, lest I miss “the best part of the day”.
But life goes on. Some years ago I asked one of my children what he was learning in primary school.
After a bit of prodding, it turned out that the answer was – very little. He spent most of his time, he said, staring out the window.
When I asked him what he thought about when he was staring out the window, he had to think about it for a bit. Then he shrugged and said: “Being Wayne Rooney.”
These days the Government has made idleness its main policy as it seeks to lead us in our fight against the ghastly Covid-19.
I’ve been watching my children, young adults really, while away days of idleness. When asked, it turns out that the superficial insouciance they display, hides an underlying current of dread.
But one day this will have passed, and then they – and maybe I too – can go back to being properly idle.