'A Mind Quite Vacant Is a Mind Distress’d'

I’ll be going halftime at the university, effective July 1, in preparation for retiring later this year. I knew a guy in high school who already yearned for retirement despite never having had a job, whereas I’d been working since I was twelve. He wanted to play golf and go fishing while I was still figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. 

I learned that I enjoyed being busy, having a purpose, even if the job was lousy (I worked for two car washes) or the boss was an egomaniac. I knew how to be frugal and save my money. As a spectator by nature I kept myself amused observing customers and c0-workers. I was twenty-five when my first newspaper hired me and my graduate education commenced. Until then, what Dr. Johnson writes in The Idler on March 29, 1760, described my experience:

 

“It very seldom happens to man that his business is his pleasure. What is done from necessity is so often to be done when against the present inclination, and so often fills the mind with anxiety, that an habitual dislike steals upon us, and we shrink involuntarily from the remembrance of our task. This is the reason why almost everyone wishes to quit his employment; he does not like another state, but is disgusted with his own.”

 

Around 1990 I interviewed a writer named Bob Black who was then living in Albany, N.Y. Black called himself an anarchist. I lost interest in anarchism when I entered puberty. His magnum opus was The Abolition of Work (1986), which opens with a pithy one-sentence paragraph: “No one should ever work.” Second paragraph:

 

“Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By ‘play’ I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive.”

 

The interview didn’t go well. It was mid-morning on a workday (sorry), and Black was drinking beer. I already knew how to interview someone whose thinking or behavior was repellent, but this guy made it difficult. Interviewing him was like trying to reason with a humorless 

adolescent. William Cowper had Black figured out in his poem “Retirement” (1781):

 

“Absence of occupation is not rest,

A mind quite vacant is a mind distress’d.”