'The Occasions When We Are Set Free'

In his essay “Work and Play,” Michael Oakeshott offers a careful definition of the latter diversion: 

“[A] game appears as a ‘free’ activity. It may have rules of its own, and it may be played with energy and require effort, but it is emancipated from the seriousness, the purposefulness, and the alleged ‘importance’ of ‘work’ and the satisfaction of wants.”

 

Children, of course, play in this sense naturally and unself-consciously. You sometimes hear play described by grownups as “children’s work,” though I’m not sure I buy that. It sounds like an adult’s retroactive attempt to make play pay off with a defined reward. One mustn’t be frivolous. A kid who thought that way, who actually had a goal when deciding to play, would likely be a boring child.

 

No one familiar with the life and work of Dr. Johnson would accuse him of frivolousness. In 1764, at the age of fifty-four, he accepted an invitation from Bennet Langton to visit his family home in Lincolnshire. Langton, with Johnson, was among the founding members of The Club, the London dining and social organization whose other members included Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate sets the scene:

 

“For whatever reason, Langton never told it to Boswell, though he passed on so much other information to him. Perhaps he simply thought Boswell would not have understood it. But he always remembered it, and as an elderly man told the story to a friend of his son when they were out walking and came to the top of a very steep hill. Back in 1764 Johnson and the Langtons had also walked to the top of this hill, and Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to ‘take a roll down.’ They tried to stop him. But he said he ‘had not had a roll for a long time,’ and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length, ‘turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom.’”

 

Those who pigeonhole Johnson as a Tory stick-in-the-mud have little sense of the whole man. He contained multitudes. Among writers, who might have joined him and taken “a roll down?” Charles Lamb, perhaps. Max Beerbohm? Even Thoreau might have had a go. I was a dedicated hill-roller as a kid even after I was stung by a bee in a hillside patch of clover. Oakeshott writes:

 

“‘Play,’ in short, stands for something that is neither ‘work’ nor ‘rest.’ It is an activity, but not an activity that seeks the satisfaction of wants. For this reason, Aristotle called it ‘non-laborious activity’—activity that nevertheless is not ‘work.’ It is a ‘leisure’ activity, not only because it belongs to the occasions when we are set free (or set ourselves free) from ‘work,’ but because it is performed in a ‘leisurely’ manner. A ‘leisurely’ manner does not mean merely ‘slowly’; it means, ‘without the anxieties and absence of cessation that belong to the satisfaction of wants.’”

 

Which, of course, recalls the spectacle of adults working hard at play.

 

[“Work and Play” was written by Oakeshott around 1960, published in First Things in 1995 and collected in What Is History? and Other Essays (Imprint Academic, 2004). Time to reread Joseph Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948).]