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.
As for the Benedictines, they weren’t too keen on rest. Being a Christian involved the full-time hard work of praying and manual labour. Rest for even a moment and the demons will take full advantage of the slacking helmsman – ‘a great storm springs up; the vessel is submerged’, as the 17th-century essayist Bossuet remarks of the Benedictine approach.
Pascal reckoned that man, by nature, actually hated resting. Hence his bustle and activity: ‘Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest,’ he writes in the Pensées. Nevertheless, diverting pastimes such as gambling and fighting and working achieve little and probably cause harm: ‘The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly [demeurer en repos] in his own room.’
The witty Montaigne sought rest. He argued that ambition was the enemy of tranquillity. All you should really do to be happy is read light novels or self-help books, he advises – ones which ‘console me and counsel me how to control my life and death’. This is more easily done, of course, when you have a legion of servants to perform the boring work of running your estates while you go for long walks.
So rest is the ultimate purpose of the busy. It’s the goal of life – call it retirement – and of the afterlife – call it eternal peace. But, perhaps weirdly, rest can also be a terrible punishment. Exile, says Corbin, was a dreadful disgrace for the 17th-century French courtier. And most of us would rather not be sent to prison. However, periods of enforced idleness can lead to new philosophical insights. Take these words of Comte Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, banished by Louis XIV for writing about the king’s activities in his books: ‘Since God willed it so, I am as fond of the gentle and peaceful life I have led for the past few years as I am of a more eventful one. I made sufficient noise in the past.’
With the advent of the factory, rest was relegated to the sidelines: ‘The freedom to take a short break was driven out by the constant rhythm of the machines.’ It was only later in the 19th century that moralists and doctors began to argue that rest was important. This was partly a result of the hunt for a cure to the ravages of tuberculosis. Doctors confined patients to the sanatorium (and remember the Saki short story ‘The Rest Cure’?).
Corbin concludes by saying that rest can be found easily enough. Just lie down on a patch of grass. Maybe take this book with you and let it fall from your hands every few pages in your own little Eden.
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