The Spirit of Leisure

THE interpretation of leisure, it may be submitted, is very particularly an individual affair, and the capacity to create and enjoy it must exist, like a sense of humor, in one’s self.

But humor can be taken on the fly; and leisure, that state of arrested energy, seems a province set aside from the dusty highways — a castle in Spain far above the plains and foothills, where we hope some day to sit at ease like the high gods and look back at the paths our tired feet found so hard to climb. We mean to conquer — finally to reach it, and oh, the preparation we spend ourselves in making! We travel heavily, breathlessly; for there is nothing more strenuous than the pursuit of the thing which pursuit kills. It is like a bird whose incomparable voice, faintly heard, lures one on, whose wings flash an invitation from a sweeping flight, and which, after the long chase, snared and netted, finally lies in one’s hand, a little pulseless bunch of feathers, forever mute.

The bird, you see, is singing in your own heart, and if you wish a willing captive whose wings will never beat about the bars, it is crumbs you must give it and — with all tenderness and sympathy — companionship.

But it is hard to do this, hard to take the time! It means losing some of the “march movement,” some of the eventful rush; falling out of the procession and burning one’s candle in the search for a primrose, say, when orchids flutter their amazing beauty for the allure and effort of the pilgrim.

For orchids spell so much that the primrose does n’t to other people, if not to one’s self; and we can always go back to the primroses another day. We really think we will! It is the promise we give ourselves as we go “ roundabout ” to our goal.

It may be advanced that the age we live in is n’t a contemplative one. One need not fight, perhaps, for the spoils of war, but one must go with the throng — caught in as an atom, if that pleases better, rather than as a struggling unit. If one stands aside for a moment or two, the threads are lost and the task of picking them up again becomes almost impossible. And we want — the most of us — to understand the web of the day’s weaving; to be, if we can, one of those who bring their gifts to make the pattern. It is born in us, this desire to be one’s self; but so is the impulse to travel on the “thousand lines,” sharing the commonplaces, the ambitions, the experiences, which are the common heritage, and from which no absolute divorce is possible.

And why should we wish it? The complexity of life could offer, if one chose, the surest refuge for one’s self, the most epicurean distillation of fragrances and singing, rising, if we listen with a finer ear, from the dust and perplexity of daily life. Perhaps only the hundredth person feels and hears it. For we are very apt, in communing with our beloved ego, to celebrate ourselves as Maurice Barrès did, leaning from a tower to overlook “ swarming barbarians ” happy in their turbulence and mediocrity. “ I will dream no more of you,” says Barrès, “ and you shall haunt me no longer. I mean to live with the part of myself that is untainted by ignoble occupations. . . . Delicious to comprehend, to develop one’s self, to vibrate, to create a harmony between the ego and the world, to fill one’s self with images vague and profound.”

“ To create a harmony between the ego and the world ” — it is the riddle of the Sphinx, the keystone of the arch; and this task of delicate adjustment, of subtle resolvement, is what makes “ no day . . . uneventful save in ourselves alone.” If we stop at home, in the house that is not rented, but is ours alone, the moment of insight comes and stills the voice that has so insistently whispered, “ Roundabout! ”

Wordsworth, of all the poets, has most, as Watson has said in one of his exquisite quatrains, —

Does n’t it come to you when you read his sonnets, like the unhurrying ripple of water flowing smoothly to the sea ? You catch the note that you long to echo for yourself.

And it is not for sadness that the contemplative spirit makes. It is rather for a refinement of ego — a spiritualizing touch that, in the quiet moment, lifts one to some individual peak of Darien and gives the fleeting view of life and thought as through a spectrum, transfused and transfigured.

Very few of us “ possess our soul; ” but to invite it, is a different matter, and there are so many ways! Not always — or, rather, not to all temperaments — rest is the requirement, the other name for leisure. One can find, and envy, the repose, the real leisure, of an invited soul more frequently in people performing some task with the fingers that leaves the mind free, than in that dolce far niente state of indolence that spells leisure to the uninitiated. A woman in a low chair by a window opening on garden greenness, sewing a long seam with steady stitches of her needle in and out, can seem to one’s fancy as measuring a rhythm of her own thoughts — the inner music of a leisure to which her occupation attunes her. And in the same way a gardener among his flowers, digging the soil, planting the seed, is often, one can imagine, pervaded in spirit by the very essence of the thing that the idle man, watching him, never attains.

One may say that all this is a matter of temperament. Leisure may come, also, by way of quiescence. Amiel’s words, “Reverie is the Sunday of thought,” indicate such a process — the sublimation of unregarded hours for this rare moment of fruition. It comes and it goes, and we long to recreate it, just as we long for spring; for, like spring, it vivifies and vitalizes impulses and desires, and gives courage to the long Wanderjahre of life.

There are those who do not seek it — painfully many! People in the grip of great wealth, or greater poverty; in the equally strong and demanding grasp of a dominating genius.

“Why don’t you rest sometimes?” a friend said to the French philosopher Arnauld. “Rest,” said the tireless Frenchman, “why should I rest here? Have n’t I an eternity to rest in ? ”

With so stern a creed few of us would agree, for to most of us — even if we deny ourselves the moment of leisure, fragmentary and snatched from busy hours — there exists a hope as we build our tower, “of some eventual rest a-top of it,”

It is the lure that makes us keep on building, though each tale of bricks we cement into place dwarfs and starves a little longer the soul we are willing — later — to give its chance. Tt is the tragedy of our country and its people that the chance the builder works for never comes, and the tower becomes too often one of silence; an immolation of spirit and body hideously complete.

All of us know the cry, — it is sordid and sad; sadder than the tears they have n’t shed: “ I wanted to make good, to finish my work and then enjoy life; to be at leisure to be happy; but the time has never come!”

“The slumber of the body,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “seems to be but the waking of the soul,” and no student of psychology can controvert the possibility. There are moments when one may indeed become aware of “the voice below the voice,” articulate and entreating for its own. And so, a study now and then of one’s self, of one’s starving overman — or underman! — is not to be counted as selfish. Does it not tend rather, in the last analysis, to make us understand with more charity the vagaries of others? does it not reveal abysses of weakness in ourselves, and perhaps point the steadfast shining of some great star by which we may steer our way ?

And in this leisure what a vista of treasure silence offers — as subtly communicable in its profound and voiceless medium as speech. It is a cathedral stillness of the soul, and has its own anthem of harmony.

Such fleeting moments, pauses in the rush of life, crystallize to those who experience them, far more than the sequence of crowded days. They are the green spots of the desert where one may have

All who have experienced it know the feeling, intangible, elusive, like the presence of a rare guest whose spell lingers on the “inner eye” and whose voice echoes, —