The Sloth Ethic

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”

I have started this occasional series with a post about Lin Yutang. After all, he’s given this blog its tagline quote, (”If you spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.’” so it’s only fair that I return the favour.

Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer and inventor. He was born in Fukien province in 1895, and died in 1976, at his home in Taiwan. He picked up degrees from St John’s Shanghai, Harvard and Leipzig, and was Professor of English at Beijing National University until he was forced to leave in 1926, blacklisted as a radical professor. After 1928, he spent most of his life in the United States (in a great quote, he says that he ‘liked the revolution but tired of the revolutionists’).

His translations of classic Chinese works into English helped popularize many of them in the West, and he invented a typewriter that could type Chinese, and a toothbrush that also dispensed toothpaste. I particularly like the latter: there’s nothing like a slightly bizarre and slightly useless invention to suggest that someone is an interesting and eccentric person.

His key work is the magnificent The Importance of Living, first published in 1937, which Yutang described as “lyrical philosophy”. The high quality of his philosophy can be seen in chapters like those on The Importance of Loafing, Lying in Bed, Smoking and Drinking Tea. And who cannot love anyone who writes: “I want to write about the philosophy of sitting in chairs because I have a reputation for lolling”.

What better way to get a feel for Dr Lin’s thinking, than to read more thoughts of the man himself. Here are some quotes from that book, and from others:

“Time is useful because it is not being used. Leisure is like unoccupied floor space in a room … it is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make life endurable”

“A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.”

“Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely.”

“…it is not when he is working in his office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, ‘Life is beautiful.’ ”

“The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.”

“The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love and sweet irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance, and who alternately wake up from life’s dream and then nods again, feeling more alive when he is dreaming than when he is awake, thereby investing his waking life with a dream-world quality.”

“I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher…”

“My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.”

“O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!”

Amazon has The Importance Of Living. When it arrives, make a cup of tea, sit back, and enjoy reading it.

(photo by Carl Van Vechten)

Tags: idling, lin yutang, sloth, slow