Essays in Idleness

Is gentle reader bored with pathogens yet? At some point in the proximate future, death will lose its sting. While there are plausible economic reasons for people to return to work, there is also a dark secret. The most restless society since the invention of restlessness cannot cope with “downtime.” This is what gives me my monopoly on Idleness. Without the “events” which help to distinguish one day from another, we will need to start a war.

Had we books, and to have developed the habit of using them, we might read history instead; and even a bit of poetry on the side. But now, at loose ends, we are inspired to do something. Also, please note, the doctrine of original sin. I’m a big fan.

My political dogma has surely been established by now. I am against “doing” anything. Fight for a world in which nothing exciting happens, other than the pursuit of beauty, goodness, and truth. Fight relentlessly — by example.

Here in Parkdale, Toronto’s go-to centre for the criminally insane, there is always entertainment. From my balconata I can spy several half-way houses, and for variety, a Tibetan temple. The streets get quieter every day, especially the throb of the superhighways. It has been softening, as the economy bleeds away; and there are clear days with no contrails in the sky.

The “Green Nude Eel” is being accomplished. Superficially, this might seem like a good thing.

But because Parkdale has been unable to start a war with our bourgeois neighbour — Liberty Village, where the childless young professionals live in sterilized apartment blocks — we have had to look for excitement elsewhere. By calling 9-1-1 frequently, the Vallishortensians (demonym for “Parkdale”) are able to keep the sirens blaring, and little knots of emergency vehicles collecting, to no definable purpose here and there. Due to my Scottish genetic endowment, I follow these skits as I would a taxi-meter: How much have we cost the taxpayers today?

In theory, once the assiduous Left has succeeded in regulating everything, we may achieve that perfect state of placid bureaucracy in which, without ever having voted for socialism, it has arrived. In practice, it never lasts long.  Some new inconvenience is discovered.

Take “racism” for instance. It is now considered “racist” to withdraw flattery for the Red Chinese politburo. Think this one through: it is the real bat contagion. Nice liberal people can now say “racist” to anything, without even running a fever. The upside is that you can give them a stroke by saying “Woo Flu,” or my current favourite, the “Xi Letter.” (I await the arrival of the Sensitivity Police, all suited up against the threat of an incorrect opinion.)

The victory of Body over Spirit is confirmed in the Church. A correspondent forwarded a particularly obnoxious, but catatonically glib, remark by one influential ecclesiastical hierarch. He and others say that “keeping people safe” is their “highest priority.”

As another priest explained — this one a believing Catholic, unlikely ever to suffer advancement — the hierarch in question probably didn’t think he was uttering Catholic doctrine, just mindlessly repeating what he had learnt by rote. If quizzed meticulously, he would probably realize that Christ was not a gym instructor; and that the salvation of souls is in many ways unlike a public health operation. He was just going with the flow, as the trivial consequence of being an idiot.

For the record: Catholicism does not keep people safe. Verily, Christianity is dangerous, which is why they are tearing churches down in China, and why, when the progressive authorities want to clamp down on public gatherings in the West, churches are the first thing they think of — even though their mental lives are spent in vast crowded shopping precincts. Closing those was a sad, regretful afterthought.

By all means follow their pandemic instructions, until you get bored and have to start a war. But the most dangerous life is not licking doorknobs. It is trying to become a saint.