In today’s post, we will look at the third virtue of the book we are reviewing, “The 21 Virtues We Need Again” which is the virtue of leisure.

The author gives a striking contrast between how Americans view work than our European counterparts.  In France, for example, many look forward to a one month summer vacation known as les grandes vacances.

While the French look forward to their vacation, we mostly sneer and finger point, taking pride in the fact that we work longer and harder than they do. But are we more productive”

As St. Paul warned those who did not work that they should not eat, one can in a sense take the work ethic too far. As the author put it,” The obsession with productivity and attendant workaholism can lead to a desensitizing, deadening, and dehumanizing of the human spirit” (pg.29).  And the author asks these questions about the modern life of working,” Is the overwork characteristic of modern life heroic or tragic? Is it humanizing or dehumanizing? Is it necessary or neurotic?”  (pg.29).

With these questions in mind, the author gives a story about what happens to a person whose life is of one thing, work. This work is Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall street”

In the story, Bartleby doesn’t do anything but work. He doesn’t leave the office for any reason. His employer and co-workers take notices that he is odd. He doesn’t even seem to have any sort of family or friends.  Also, he is obsessed with doing his own work, and would not quit his task to run errands or do copy work for others.  One final straw for his employer is finding him working on Sunday. However, Bartleby would not be quitted.  He continued to stay at work, even though he was not employed, and slept in the doorway.  Exasperated, the lawyer finally moves his business to other quarters, but Bartleby continues to torment the new lawyer who occupies the old office. Without any other resources, Bartleby is turned over to social services, and when visited by his former employer in the almshouse, he is preferring not to eat, and the outcome is inevitable.

While this is an extreme case, there are many social, physical, and spiritual woes that accompany workaholism.  In this book, “Take back your Time: Fighting Time Poverty in America” edited by John de Graaf, depicts many of the social ills that obsession with work causes, such as the neglect of children, the increase of divorce, the loss of health, the decline in voter participation, and the loneliness of the elderly.” (pg. 30).

As the author puts it, “What a person does daily on a habitual basis is either life giving or death dealing, and has effects on body, mind and soul.” (pg.35).

Thus, leisure should not be looked upon as a bad thing, but as a good things, as another author put it, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski in his book, “All You who Labor” , “ Work must make way for the other tasks of the day. Man must have time for prayer, for rest, for conversation with family, for his hobbies, and for helping his neighbors. When work is done, man must remain a man, that is to say a social being.” (pg. 36).

So, let us not toil away fruitlessly without physical and mental rest as Bartley the Scrivener, but let us enjoy rest, for its very essence is to nourish our souls…. “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” (Genesis 2:2 KJV).

 

Au Revoir,

Alyssa