A few other thoughts related to yesterday's post about the world of total work and whether one ought to love his work.
In his classic study, Pieper was not really criticizing the world of total work that I mostly live in right now. He was criticizing the notion that even one's leisure time is good for only two things: frenzied activity and resting up for more work.
Pieper's notion of leisure was Chestertonian. As I wrote years ago in a "throw back" book review of Pieper's little book:
Work is not being replaced with leisure, but rather with intense play (serious golf, elaborate vacations, home improvement). Wage work is replaced with play work. This is like changing from a smelly shirt into the sweat-soaked shirt you jogged in a few hours earlier. Leisure is the highest pursuit because it does nothing, not because it permits us to run about wild. Leisure obsessed with activity is mere restlessness. At the turn of the millennium, we have regained the truth that man is made for more than work, but we haven't grasped that man is made for true leisure, for stillness, so true leisure still isn't there. And neither will be the grace.
G.K. Chesterton recognized the same thing in one of his essays, in which he lauds “the most precious, the most-consoling, the most pure and holy, the noble habit of doing nothing at all.” He observed that such leisure
is being neglected in a degree which seems to me to threaten the degeneration of the whole race. It's because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to worship reverently the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.
I don't have time to dive back into Leisure, but I suspect Pieper wouldn't object to the person who simply abandons himself to his life situation and accepts the world of total work while at the office, as long as the person thankfully accepts and properly uses whatever scraps of leisure fall from the work plate onto the floor.
