Friday, September 13, 2002

In Praise of Idleness

"What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare.” When I first read this couplet in highschool, I immediately took against it. The rhythm and rhyme were trite and, clearly, the author had no idea how dumb he’d look propped against a fence as per the picture in the textbook. The next lines were even worse: “No time to stand beneath the boughs/ And stare as long as sheep or cows.” In English schoolyard invective at the time, “cow” was a term of abuse for a girl, so the poet’s invitation to stare like a cow didn’t appeal at all.

These days, however, my attitude to idleness has mellowed. Barely three weeks into the new academic year and I am irrevocably behind at work. My desk is heaped with piles of papers, every one a mute witness to some urgent task not done. Every post-it note accuses me of sloth. Against this scenery, standing and staring has deep appeal, bovine or no.

In the West, in pursuit of relaxation, we have succumbed en masse to sitting and staring at the TV. Talk of “vegging out in front of the TV” and “couch potatoes” suggests that watching TV is even less demanding than staring, cow-like over a fence. On the contrary, though, TV is a relentlessly demanding medium. TV stops your thoughts from wandering where they will; it wants all your attention all the time, like the worst bore at a party.

I find there’s something soothing about observing other creatures go about their business. Watching other people work is not relaxing for those raised in the protestant work ethic - self-consciousness and then guilt at one’s own indolence kick in too soon. But, there really is nothing I can do to assist that bee harvesting pollen on the face of a sunflower, so I’m off the hook and can just settle into spectatorship. The bee follows its own imperatives, which have nothing to do with me and my concerns. A harried blue jay rifles through the hedgerow, tossing leaves aside like an executive looking for files to shred. Abruptly, the jay flies off, leaving me and my similes dangling.

A person needs a certain amount of un-programmed time, if she is to be productive. Virginia Woolf says, “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” Perhaps this is true for groups as well as individuals, for example, in the workplace. If gossip around the coffee machine be the office idling, in my experience, it is indeed a context where submerged truths often come to the top.

Gossip generally has a bad reputation: critics describe gossip as a kudzu vine of mischief and malice, spreading falsehoods and swallowing up careers as it grows. Frankly, I think this is unfair. Anyone who’s ever gossiped - and I won’t tell on you, if you won’t tell on me - knows that gossip can be a source of accurate information, which can be used for good as well as ill. A 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review advises managers not to uproot, but rather to prune, the office grapevine. With good husbandry, the author says, gossip can help sustain a healthy workplace.

Others have rushed to defend gossip. Social anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, sees gossip as a vital function of language. He claims that human speech evolved primarily to convey knowledge about the social group, rather than the external environment, as the standard view would have it. When our ancestors started living in larger groups, talking about absent others offered a more efficient way of maintaining social cohesion than social grooming. Meanwhile, the feminist philosopher, Lorraine Code, argues that gossip can be an essential source of knowledge for the powerless, and that it is precisely through gossip’s rambling method that the truth is pieced together. Either way, it turns out that time chatting idly about other people and their doings is rarely just idle chat.

On my way to the coffee machine, wondering who will be around to share their news and views, for Michiana Chronicles, this is Louise Collins.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on September 13, 2002
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