Guide on How to Rest

Many will tell you that you're meant to enjoy it, but you need to hate it

Thales knew how to make millions. When challenged on the value of philosophy, he made a simple bet: using the philosophy you dismiss, I’ll become a rich man. His interlocutor scoffed. Thales was known for gazing at the stars. Once, as is told in a joke, Thales walked right into a ditch. A servant girl nearby exclaimed: “He knows everything about the stars and can’t watch his own feet!” Of course, the stars have everything to do with money, and Thales became very rich.

We must imagine Thales an urbane sort of man. Although cities always contain modernity in them, we shouldn’t assume that civic life has ever changed. Cities are an old invention. Urbanity is essential to the city, and you can’t expect a concept to sprout wings 5000 years after its birth. Cities are now larger and more dominant, and their native industries have sprouted and declined in turn, but we would not expect any of this to change their character.

Ancient cities were islands of civilization in a sea of rural primitiveness. Any city-dweller would be more likely to converse with the richest or poorest of his neighbours than he would be to converse with a country bumpkin, except when haggling at the market. Just as cities have ballooned in size in modern times, this sea of ruralness has receded. Where there were once impassable oceans, now there are traversable lakes and rivers, crowning city-constellations in a 2-billion-year Reich. Now, in the developed countries, the countryside is something cut across and settled in by city-dwellers. Not so in ancient times. To travel by land for even 75 miles would be double the price of a intercontinental journey by sea. The great cities of the Mediterranean were linked by the sea and nothing more. Thus, we might explain the ancient association of the helmsman with political sovereignty, and troubled waters with civil war. There is a convincing argument that the industry truly special to Europe is shipbuilding. No other civilization has excelled in it as Europeans have. This reason alone is why Ancient Greece is considered the beginning of European civilisation. In the historical memory of Ancient Athens, the great naval empire of its day, Thucydides saw King Minos alone as Athens’ predecessor. This is, of course, a mythological correlate with the real historical Minoan Empire, which of the Bronze Age states was the primary maritime power.

One of the earliest assumptions made in Ancient Greek astronomy was that the cosmos was round. Around the terrestrial sphere was a celestial sphere. The universe was a ball with inner layers which got more immaterial as you headed to the crust. This might seem like an obvious assumption. After all, the planet is round, the sun and stars move across the sky in a circular motion. So, I am happy to introduce you to this assumption.

Intellectual and creative work must be interspersed with breaks of reflection and observation. Nothing more than this is the reality of the relation of criticism to the arts and humanities. What is the critic’s role? To provide a rest from the work of art. The 20^th century boom in criticism was a response to the invention of mechanical reproduction. This tired everyone out, and in order to return to their rapidly intensifying projects (for instance, the invention of meaninglessness), they needed to sit down and watch birds for a while. This, then, is all that needs to be said about criticism.

The writer, too, must provide their reader with breaks. This is what is meant when writers are asked to ease their introspection: “there is so much of yourself in this, I need a break.” Imagery is really the main way for writers and readers to rest. All the writer does in writing imagery is look at something. They do not even have to look at anything. If there is nothing to look at, this becomes the imagery, and a great many novels are the result of writers looking at nothing at all, or nothing in particular. Some writers do look at things, and we might invoke the ancient allegorical connection between the poet and the spear-thrower, used famously by Pindar:

As for me, in my eagerness to praise that man, I hope that I may not be like one who hurls the bronze-cheeked javelin, which I brandish in my hand, outside the course, but that I may make a long cast, and surpass my rivals.

Why are poets and javelinists, of all people, comparable? Why would Pindar not invoke wrestling (since an invective poet in the mold of Hipponax may as well be said to gouge his opponent’s eyes out), or chariot-racing (since one mounts a chariot and applies the yoke and rein to his horses just as one mounts the speaking platform and reins the Muses)? Of course, just like sport, poetry is a public performance, one that a heroic figure competes in to win renown and immortality. In javelin throwing, there is a target, and the athlete is measurably far from the target. Victory is not a binary state as in wrestling, but a distance from the target. It is not as in chariot-racing, where the goal is to get there first. After all, poets compete with poets of all times, and only the worst poets have ever won for having come first. No, the distance is spatial, a distance from the target. Yes, the poet has a target they must hit. When a poet is looking at something, they are seeing a target that they must make theirs. Thus, Schopenhauer’s claim that genius hits a target no one else can see.

I returned from Mongolia over a month ago now, and have gradually shifted into a stable, rewarding routine. I have found work, started writing daily again, exercising, and reading a great deal. In short, I have enjoyed the life of leisure that rests on surplus value previously extracted. After working in Mongolia for a year I have saved a good deal of money, done a good deal of meaningful things, and aged. This was all good work in service of my biological organism. Immediately after finishing this work and moving home to the UK, I shifted into a coma and did nothing at all for a month or so. Occasionally I would go out to drink and see friends, before lazily shuffling home to be born. I briefly became nocturnal and I was often too lazy to do any drugs.

Rest is a miserable thing. This is the realisation of a few historical geniuses, such as Napoleon and Thatcher, who are both key to the British character. I would like to be in activity all the time. So stubbornly, that I fail at resting by trying to turn it into activity, and then end up trapped restless, unable to really do anything. Many writers have made the point, I’m sure Byung-Chul Han has, the charlatan, did you know he only writes 50 words a day? Many writers have made the point that we have lost the capacity for rest as something joyful and genuinely resting. Instead, we view rest as time to self-improve, and so are really just perpetually elevating productivity. If we are not working, we are adding to our capacity to work in the future. Of course, all theorists call this a very bad thing. But they do not want to see what a society that truly loves resting looks like. This is Tsarist Russia (the October Revolution can be likened to the frantic activity of someone who realizes they’ve done nothing all day, or the energy filling an old man who has suddenly realized that it is possible for him to do things, and only begins his life’s project in his 70^th year), this is 100,000 years of hunter-gatherer hell, this is existence before life at all, when the universe was still sleeping and all the stars meant nothing because there was nobody to interpret them. The one who stays in the present is done with resting. So, the man or woman of accomplishment and dignity must never really enjoy resting. They must gravely tolerate it, like a tumour. And, resting is of course not diminished by the fact that one hates it. In fact, the one who hates resting usually rests longer, for the aforementioned reason that they are not good at it, and also because they secretly love what they hate, and this is a more satisfying form of life, a more true and demented rest. The one who hates resting enjoys it like an affair, and cums harder, with difficulty.

Thus, it was also divinely ordained that the good critic is one who hates being a critic, and who wishes they were doing something else. They ought to be lifting large rocks to crack over the heads of their brothers… but no, they love that their work is looking at things which may or may not exist. We must allow them to loaf around in the margins of our work, just as we must allow the vagrant passage into our home, a rule of guestright nowadays forgotten. In fact, this reveals the truth, that criticism used to be a far more elitist, more aristocratic activity than what we call criticism today. Nowadays we hire wage-loafers to loaf around for us – thus, indirectly, all citizens are able to partake in loafing around, since their surplus goes to supporting those at rest. The most extraordinary insight of the Post-War Order is that citizens should be paid for doing nothing, and this resulted in the only happy and prosperous period of human history. In ancient times, only members of the propertied classes could rest, invoking the surplus gained from the countryside. This was a vanishingly small percentage of ancient society – to support one city-dweller, there had to be around 10 peasant farmers. That one city-dweller alone experienced leisure from the leisure of 10 others. Now, if we do not experience leisure, we at least pay someone to experience it for us, and we all trade leisure around in a great game, the universal suicide of the human race.

So, I quite miserably spent my time resting, and am now doing things again. Once, when I told my professor I was working on Lykophron’s Alexandra, he told me he always knew I was a very serious young man, and this of course was an insult in the form of an observation (if you dare tell me this was a neutral comment I will call you a rube, all observations are insults and you should never tell someone what you observe about them). But he was entirely incorrect and this has bothered me for some years now. Famously, Lykophron’s programmatic statement as to the essential quality of his poetry was that it was obscure, the reader would have to very carefully follow the path laid out by Lykophron to understand anything at all. Your wagon must drive carefully: this is of course a response to Callimachus’ own programme, which involved keeping the Muse slender, and driving on a narrow path. Callimachus’ programme was slimness, Lykophron’s was obscurity. You will notice that while there might be a certain tightness to Callimachus’ slimness, there is not a hint of tightness in obscurity, and tightness is required for seriousness. This will appear self-evident to my subscribers, who are literate each and all. There is nothing at all serious about obscurity, and nothing serious about reading something obscure. So, it will have to be said that my learned professor’s comment was entirely incorrect, thus invalidating the entire edifice of our feuilleton-obsessed “Higher Education System”.

Van Gogh, Noon, rest from work, 1890