Pages

Sunday 11 October 2015

That sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence

We had stepped down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp.
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Blithedale Romance (1852)

From Wikipedia
The Blithedale Romance is a work of fiction based on Hawthorne's recollections of Brook Farm, a short-lived agricultural and educational commune where Hawthorne lived from April to November 1841. The commune, an attempt at an intellectual utopian society, brought together many famous Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller

In the novel's preface, Hawthorne describes his memories of this temporary home as "essentially a daydream, and yet a fact" which he employs as "an available foothold between fiction and reality." His feelings of affectionate scepticism toward the commune are reflected not only in the novel, but also in his journal entries and in the numerous letters he wrote from Brook Farm to Sophia Peabody, his future wife.

In a somewhat lighthearted way, Hawthorne presents the Blithedale movement as a renunciation of middle class indolence which in his time represented a huge contrast between working people and those who did not work with their hands.

He implies that this is what the middle classes really want and generally achieve - that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It is surely what many of us seem to desire too and here in the twenty-first century a far greater proportion of the population have achieved it.

How securely we don’t yet know, but indolence is attractive. We foster it in numerous ways from social drinking to passive entertainments such as TV and cinema, from dining out to relaxing in the sun. One might even say that fostering indolence has been deliberate and it isn’t difficult to see why that could be so.

A population in love with indolence is laid-back and not likely to upset the established order. It is likely to be generally accepting, easily pleased and manipulated. Not only that but... Blimey I’ve finished my glass of port...

4 comments:

Demetrius said...

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

A K Haart said...

Demetrius - I'm surprised we allow it.

James Higham said...

Pour another, quick.

A K Haart said...

James - I have.