Essays in Idleness

I bring gentle reader shocking news. It is Labour Day already. In North American terms, this means that the summer is over, and we must return to work. Allow me to sound like Trump for the occasion; one reader says I always sound like Trump, and I would hate to disappoint him. The work before us is yuge, putting things back together that we have wantonly pulled apart. It was the summer of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and of the Batflu Gestapo; all perfectly unnecessary, and each founded on deceit.

The gentleman also says that I am a “Truther.” So let me also rant on behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful. For these are things voluntarily sought, as opposed to shoved down our throats by swinish bureaucrats and violent demonstrators. (The Nuremberg Rallies were also “mostly peaceful.”)

There will be elections, here and there; we have a moral duty to cut all the radicals off their funding. Trump says, “Make America Great Again,” but when not proposing Christian sanctity instead, I say, “Mow them down to marmalade.” Start with the public health officials.

Er, I mean this “metaphorically,” of course; lest I be charged with a “political incorrectitude.” I try to be “metaphorically correct” at all times, and whenever I can, to massacre the vilest ideas.

The most effective strategy is to recover, in our own souls, the idleness of labour; the notion of Homo Ludens, of all good work as play. The best jobs are not done exclusively for money, which, like anything that becomes “virtual,” will not be worth anything, soon. The best work is done wilfully, as an end in itself. It is to make things that are the opposite of “virtual,” including, every day, the example of good living.

Humility is the great weapon against the arrogance that would impose “employment” on other people; that compels them, under the threat of arrest or starvation, to do what they don’t want to do, or to do what they believe to be evil. Simply avoid these tyrants, until they catch up with you. Get as far away from them as you can, in your own vocation.

Inscribed into a Gothic joist, I saw somewhere in Olde England (in what was once the hall of a mediaeval farmhouse), a carpenter’s declaration. This was: “In the work of my hands I am closest to God.” That work was being undone by death-watch beetles, but this only gave another generation of workmen an opportunity to work with their hands, and in their archaeological skills to be closer to the same Maker.

A little-known fact is that all honest work is liturgical. This includes such jobs as cleaning toilets. I once watched the son of a gloriously old man, still living independently, alone in his modest residential cell, go to work on his porcelain. His son, scrubbing the thunder box, looked like he was enjoying himself. By the time he stopped for tea, it was gleaming. This younger man also worked daytime, as a lawyer. (Perhaps he enjoyed that, too.) In his own phrase, he liked to “live like a marine” — so far as that was possible with nearly a dozen children. I daresay he had changed a few diapers, too. This is holy work.

At the other extreme, we have union members, such as public schoolteachers. Note that these unions have been diminished since their conception in ancient guilds. They strike today only for more money, which indicates a hate crime. They hate their jobs. They think that if there is the slightest danger they should walk off them. But it is precisely where there is danger that work is most rewarding. Mow them down, I say.

In the highest sense, our work should be idle. As the Shakers said, “Hands to work and minds to God.” They were wonderfully unboastful people who, by their craftsmanship, speak still to our time.