![]() ![]() In her 1859 debut novel Adam Bede ( public library), Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot (November 22, 1819–December 22, 1880), speaks with remarkable prescience to how the modern relinquishing of leisure in the service of anxious productivity is squeezing the essential livingness out of life: George Eliot by Alexandre Louis François d’Albert Durade That mode of being, once available to shepherds and sheikhs alike, is now under siege from the unrelenting cult of workaholism and productivity that has only grown in ferocity in the decades since Russell and Pieper.īut perhaps the greatest defense of leisure came nearly a century earlier, not in philosophy but in fiction, from a woman who was yet to make her grand entrance into literature by age forty, then received fan mail from Charles Dickens and went on to become one of our civilization’s most beloved writers. ![]() A generation later, the obscure German philosopher Josef Pieper made a beautiful case for leisure as the basis of culture - an endangered “condition of the soul” to which we owe just about every great intellectual and creative achievement. ![]() “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?” Bertrand Russell asked in his 1926 treatise on human nature and the good life as humanity straddled the gorge between the Industrial Revolution and the Mad Men era of twentieth-century consumerism. ![]()
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