'The Task of Doing Nothing Much at All'

I’ve always thought of goofing off as one of the American fine arts, up there with western movies and jazz. In high school, I worked summers and weekends in an aluminum casting plant owned by a friend of my father. The work was hot and dirty, and we sometimes worked twelve-hour shifts. I was generously paid, all cash and off the books. Most of my co-workers were a few years older than me and all were Puerto Rican. They spoke more English than I spoke Spanish, but we all spoke fluent goofing off. 

When the boss called a break, we went outside, walked down the alley and around the corner, and sat on overturned fifty-five-gallon drums, where one of the other guys lit up a joint and shared it. Now I think of Whitman: “I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.” We also goofed off less formally, one at a time, with the others acting as lookouts, either outside or in the filthy men’s room.

 

From that experience I learned the therapeutic importance of goofing off. Call it idling, lollygagging, malingering. The point was to maximize down time, stop working but not look like you might not go back to work for a couple of hours. Remain conscious and alert for the approach of the boss. We were living exemplars of the German philosopher Josef Pieper’s refutation of what he called “total work,” though none of us, I’m sure, yet knew Pieper or his book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948; trans., 1952 and 1998).

 

So, it’s not strictly an American pastime. In his poem “Fashion Statement” (Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Collected Verse 2008–2011, 2012) Clive James remembers his undergraduate years at the University of Sydney, Australia:

 

“. . . young men with no business. How it fills

My mind with longing now, the memory

Of lurking off with endless energy

 

“To read the poets – seldom on the course –

To write a poem – never quite resolved –

To be removed from Manning House by force –

It was where the women were – to be involved

Completely – never fear what might befall –

In the task of doing nothing much at all.”