I am still thinking about boredom and the virtues of the boring life. On a recent flight, I watched the movie “Living” on a lark. (One can only watch a movie on a lark when you’re midair. I don’t think anyone plans these things out.) I had remembered seeing the trailer, which did not make the film seem at all appealing. It seemed like it was a very trite boring-old-man-learns-how-to-enjoy-life-from-young-do-gooders story:
But it was phenomenal. (The day after we landed, I badgered my wife to watch the movie, so I got to see it again.) It is indeed about a boring old man who learns an important lesson. But it is not trite in the least. It’s also a story about heroic ordinariness — or maybe heroism within the ordinary. Or the possibility of carrying out a calling within a crushing bureaucracy. Also, and you wouldn’t know this from whatever dolts made the trailer, it’s a remake of Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” the script adapted by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.
There’s this one great scene, one of the best movie scenes you’ll have seen in recent years, where the protagonist praises another character’s inspiring joie de vivre, and the character replies, “I’m just an ordinary person like everybody else. I have no such special quality.” How long has it been since an American movie (note that “Living” is a British picture) held up normality as a heroic virtue? That being a totally boring and normal human being was an aspirational state?
Anyway, “Living” is on Netflix. You probably didn’t see it when it came out. Few did. It should have been a much bigger deal than it was. See it.
I’d like to tell you about two new essays I wrote just for you in the New York Times: one in praise of almanacs, the other in praise of leisure. Maybe I’m really praising the same thing; I don’t know.
The first is a short piece for the NYT Magazine’s Letter of Recommendation column, on one of my favorite books, the World Almanac and Book of Facts. Here’s a taste:
The Almanac has always presented data flatly, with no hierarchy of value. The 1868 volume wedges the Positivist’s Calendar (with 13 28-day months named for such figures as Archimedes and Caesar) in between the text of the proposed 14th Amendment, granting equal protection under U.S. law, and a paragraph on “Extension of the Elective Franchise at the North.” In recent editions, the complete text of the United States Constitution, nine pages long, appears well after 13 pages listing “Entertainment Personalities of the Present,” including where and when they were born (Arsenio Hall, Cleveland, Feb. 12, 1955). H.I.V. infection rates and climate-change data reside under the same cover as a roster of bowling champions.
The essay is about my lifelong love for the almanac and its position in a world in which facts are trivially easy to acquire and also no one cares about them. I tried to figure out why I still enjoy reading the almanac nevertheless.
There wasn’t space in the column for me to talk about the impressive list of dorky celebrities who have endorsed the almanac over the years. The almanac’s cover still touts one from Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle writer whose work appears at the back of the very magazine that published my essay. As recently as three years ago, the almanac’s website boasted of praise from Calvin Coolidge, James A. Michener, Placido Domingo, and other earnest men. The best line is a tragicomic howler from Jimmy Carter: “As a private citizen, Governor and President, I have depended on The World Almanac for precise and accurate information – and for entertainment.” I wonder: Did Carter look with dismay at grim statistics in the almanac, or did he turn to it as a refuge from reality? Did it feed in him a sense that there was order in the world, despite the daily ticker of bad news: the oil shock, the hostage crisis, stagflation?
It was only in the editorial process that I learned that the great Sam Anderson had written a short essay on the almanac in 2011. This was a “Riff,” if you remember that column, which was basically the predecessor of the Letter of Recommendation. Anderson wrote the first-ever LOR on Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” and one of the best, on eating chips.
This is my second Letter of Recommendation; the first was on cheap sushi. These essays are a lot of fun to write, because they have to fit into a very tight space, just 900 words, give or take a few. It’s a worthy challenge that forces you and your editor to make every word carry its weight. Since the essay is pretty short and needs to make sense without any internet links, you actually can give attention to every word, every punctuation mark.
One day, friends, I hope to write a longer story for the magazine. But first I’ll need a really good idea. Here’s the almanac essay again.
The other essay, published to coincide with back-to-school and Labor Day, is something my students have heard me say for many years: school is not your job. It’s not work. Properly speaking, it is (or ought to be) leisure.
It’s not easy to make space for leisure within universities that look increasingly like corporations. It’s not easy to fit open-ended contemplation into a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. Still, at their best, colleges and universities offer an alternative to the culture that values people solely for their labor.
Yes, a college education will help someone earn more in a career. That’s a good thing. But life is much more than work.
The essay will introduce you to Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr., who teaches at Austin Community College. Ted came to my attention via his essay, “A Renaissance from Below” in The Point, in which he expresses his optimism that the humanities can thrive at community colleges and, from there, reinvigorate the humanities at the four-year colleges many community college students eventually transfer into. Ted also heads up The Great Questions Foundation, which helps community college faculty develop the discussion-based pedagogy Ted uses to such good effect. The foundation is currently taking applications for a faculty fellowship. If you teach at a U.S. community college, look into it.
I have been writing about leisure and education forever. One of the first things I ever published, back in 2005, was an essay about leisure for the Chronicle of Higher Education. (It’s behind a sturdy paywall, which is really for the best. That was my Carrie Bradshaw phase as a writer. One paragraph in the essay really does begin, “I wonder, then…”)
The big influence on all my thinking about leisure is Josef Pieper, the 20th century German philosopher who wrote Leisure, the Basis of Culture. The book is a great challenge not just to our society’s work ethic but to my own, and perhaps to yours as well. Pieper writes: “The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.” Uh oh.
If you want to read even more about leisure, check out Zena Hitz’s essay in Plough Quarterly, “What Is Time For?” It’s very good!
I wrote my essay in the hope that parents, high school teachers, and college professors would share it with their children and students. Based on the nice emails I’ve received in response to the piece, that seems to be happening. The one that really made my day came from a first-year student who realized he was thinking too narrowly about what college had to offer him. I have high hopes for this guy.
For readers of Portuguese, the Brazilian health magazine Veja Saúde publshed an interview with me about O Fim do Burnout.
And if you’ve been waiting for The End of Burnout to appear in Lithuanian translation, wait no longer! Just out from publisher Liūtai ne avys is Alinantis perdegimas: kai darbas mus sekina ir neteikia pasitenkinimo, available for a mere five euros. It has a rather striking cover: