Sherry Chandler

The other day over at Art Croft, Charlie Hughes remarked that his father had always said you can’t work sitting down. Charlie laughed and said, “I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove him wrong.”

I’ve been working my way peripatetically through Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Seems the appropriate way to approach this treatise on not working, not even while you’re sitting down. And on this easy-going mid-summer holiday, it seems appropriate to talk a little bit about Doing Nothing. Grilling out is hard work, after all, and I don’t like explosions.

It’s a thought-provoking book and one of the first thoughts it provoked was: Why are all these lie-abouts writers? Well, the answer to that one is pretty self-evident (and that’s as close as I’m getting to the Declaration of Independence today). It’s only writers who talk about doing nothing. Neither life’s real Bertie Woosters nor it’s real tramps and hobos are going to think much about what they’re doing. Nor, if they did think about it, will they do the hard work of writing their thoughts down in any kind of organized and readable fashion.

Writing is hard work, and if you doubt it, I challenge you to spend eight hours at it one day. Then take account of how your body feels. I know for a fact that Charlie Hughes works hard. So do most writers work very hard to preserve their lazy ways. This is the book’s first (and perhaps its central) irony: Many proponents of doing nothing work hard while many proponents of hard work do no such thing.

Take, for example, those 18th century Enlightenment contemporaries, Samuel Johnson and Ben Franklin. Dr. Johnson, who invented a genre writing as The Idler, worked very hard. The list of his writings is prodigious, including his famous Dictionary of the English Language. Lutz points out that Johnson put the Dictionary together in nine years with six assistants while the OED, which replaced it 150 years later, took 70 years and many, many editors and contributors. (On the other hand, the OED is a very different and more thorough creature than Dr. Johnson’s rather idiosyncratic Dictionary.) “The Idler,” says Johnson, “who habituates himself to be satisfied with what he can easily obtain, not only escapes labours which are often fruitless, but sometimes succeeds better than those who despise all that is within their reach, and think of every thing more valuable as it is harder to be acquired.” (Doing Nothing, p. 69)

Meanwhile, Ben Franklin. Lutz credits him with practically inventing the American capitalist work ethic through his writings in Poor Richard’s Almanack and The Way to Wealth. It was Franklin who gave us both the phrase and the attitude “Time is Money.” But the man himself learned very early that “it was more important to appear busy than to be busy, the appearance of virtue, he felt, being at least as essential as the virtue itself.” (Doing Nothing, p. 68) And so, when he was setting up in the printing business as a young man, he would make sure he was seen pushing rolls of paper down the street in a wheelbarrow but he handed off to an employee as soon as he was out of sight. And of course, we all remember how his indolent (and randy) behavior as an American commissioner in Paris scandalized John Adams.

Johnson and Franklin met briefly at a party in May 1760. Johnson scorned Franklin as a revolutionary but Boswell was taken with him.

And so, says Lutz:

Samuel Johnson, the busy idler, and Benjamin Franklin, the industrious dilettante, did for work what writers, and perhaps only writers and other artists, can do: they took the evolving understanding of their working in the world, and created a series of crystallizing images. The complex images they concocted have remained so central to our understanding of work that hundreds of years later we still recognize them, still find them compelling, and still haven’t resolved any of their internal contradictions. (Doing Nothing, p. 73)

At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

— William Stafford, from The Way It Is (Greywolf Press, 1977)