A celebration of idleness

Tom Hodgkinson, How to be idle
We can say, without fearing of being accused of exaggeration, that Tom Hodgkinson’s is a genuine celebration of the spirit. After having been taught, from Engels on, that work turned the monkey into man, we joyfully discover that someone has the guts to make an eulogy of the afternoons when Thecat plays with a Mozart candy while you’re lying on the couch, writing a book review and expecting nothing.

Contrary to any expectations of the reading audience, Tom Hodgkinson refuses the temptations of the Marxist dialectics. His idle is far from being a monkey passing its days with the tail curled around a branch, swinging upside down. Tom Hodgkinson’s idle is a man, with fully human skills.

The author build his book around the finding that nowadays people are conditioned by society to be active. Being active, people go to meetings, make loans, pay their house and car credits, while their lives unnoticeably pass by them, just like a fly flying by the gab of a sleepy cat. Tom Hodgkinson aims, through this manifesto-book, to wake up the cat and to give it an impulse to catch the fly.

Unfortunately, and for our eternal desolation, the author suffered from a laziness attack and didn’t felt like showing us the way any more.
The idle cat continues to sleep, and we are condemned to live our active lives spining around our tails in meetings and lines at the bank, slaving for our homes and cars.

gavagai and Thecat, on a sunday afternoon.