On Work & Leisure
A measure of bourgeois working life is the flow of shirts to and from the cleaners. Mine also tracked how formal work attire gave way to casual and then ultimately to the current tendency of men to dress like boys. When my daily round became irregular, the pace of cleaning slowed. I still dress up when I conduct business in town, some of it, but I shifted to cheaply sourced work shirts and workmen’s jackets, trading one uniform for another.
I’m still making a transition from working life to leisure. The bourgeois theme applies to both. I’m bourgeois to the core and long for a bourgeois republic or more of one than is locally on offer. (I’m reading an account of my class — a three-volume doorstopper that I may or may not get through.) Leisure, per Aristotle, is what I call “my own work” or “work on my own account,” as distinguished from the work I did for others from childhood forward. I’d separate the latter into two broad categories: work done for money; and work done at other’s suggestions. The two overlap, of course, but the second category was primarily reputational, when I look back at it.
This brief piece is a product of my leisure. And yet I’ve written things like this almost my entire life, fitting them in amid the work done for others — at their behest or suggestion. I was lucky to find relatively good fits between my talents and my activities, and patronage to develop new things. Several of them have outlasted my tenure. One project I initiated with my wife’s sister is back from the dead and may do more than anything for my reputation. It almost cost me my marriage, but that’s another story.
Leisure probably benefits from fitting into the cracks of working life, because organizing it is difficult. This is the main challenge of transitioning from one state to the other: how to give it a reasonable structure; how to allow for the apparent wastes of time that in reality are crucial to the productive use of leisure; and how deal with death as the leitmotif of a longish life, requiring you to conjure up the child’s trick of being caught up in the everyday, not caring how it’s spent and yet caring how it’s spent — wanting to fish, wanting the fish, and wanting to be the fish, in succession, and also wanting to be out on the water or beside it, marveling at the sunlight, sounds, summer’s heat.
