The important business of idle loafing

In our godless, post-industrial, hyper-competitive world, rest is seen merely as recuperation: it’s when we man-machines ‘recharge our batteries’, as the cliché goes, before dashing back to the factory or work-station. It’s a negative concept. You rest for a reason, which is to avoid burnout.

All you should really do to be happy is read light novels or self-help books, advises Montaigne

But as this charming and subtle meditation on the subject from a grand French historian shows, rest used to be far more than just taking time off. It is a religious concept. Take the rest enjoyed by Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost. In the Garden of Eden, work is a mere condiment to the important business of sweet loafing:

They sat them down and, after no more toil

Of their sweet gardening labour than sufficed

To recommend cool Zephyr, and make ease

More easy…

And I don’t need to remind you that unrest in the form of hard toil and pain in childbirth were God’s punishments for Adam and Eve’s ‘disobedience’.

But God also demands rest in the form of the sabbath. So, in the Old Testament, rest was a duty. It meant something like ‘remembering God’. The seventh day, says Exodus, will be ‘a day of complete rest, consecrated to Yahweh’. It’s not a fun day: ‘You must not light a fire.’ But it’s not for sleeping. And every seventh year will also be dedicated to God: ‘The land is to have its rest, a sabbath for Yahweh.’

Rest, in Alain Corbin’s telling, as the centuries move on, becomes a more personal matter. During the Middle Ages, life should be lived virtuously in order to secure eternal rest after death. Hence the word requiem, meaning rest. Sacred music, says Corbin, is all about the hope for sweet repose.