Idleness

Producer's Note

Idleness has always appealed to me. In fact, when I was young I was quite an expert on it in a practical kind of way, but the cares and concerns of adult life have long since crowded it out. At least, however, I can take this chance to remember what it was like to do nothing much without being bothered by the thought that there is something I ought to be doing. And if by my airing these lost feelings Radio 3 listeners are encouraged to put down their tools or their books or their bills to be paid or whatever else it is that’s distracting them from the true path of simply being, well so much the better.

Not that the background knowledge that there are tasks being left undone has to be an obstacle to the enjoyment of idleness. In Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome memorably remarked that ‘work fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours’, but I have found a longer essay by him on the thrill of committed inactivity from his irresistibly titled Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. For the Mole, too, in The Wind in the Willows, the pleasure of going out into the spring air is precisely that of having abandoned his cleaning.

The first warm morning of this year’s spring is glorious outside my window as I write this, a strong temptation to follow Mole’s example and get out there and bask in it. Similar siren calls are heard in Robert Fuller Murray’s poem ‘Indolence’ and Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’, and drowsy days in the sun also inspire Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune, the sleeping shepherd-boy from Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’, Ray Davies’s Sunny Afternoon and the old Bing Crosby/Louis Armstrong larkabout Gone fishin’. Drugs, on the other hand, account for the torpor of the marriners of Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (an extract from which I have paired with a section of Parry’s grand setting of it), while the magic power of the goddess Cybelle to lull the hero Atys to sleep is the scene-setter for Lully’s delicious operatic sommeil.

Of course, there has to be some moralising: James Thomson rails against the slug-abed in a section from his eighteenth-century poetic hit ‘The Seasons’, and the music tells you that Sloth cannot be a good thing for Anna in Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins. Montaigne, in his Essays, takes a more analytical approach.

But idleness is the winner in this programme: Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s Lazybones show only the mildest disapproval of its subject, and Joseph Crosby Lincoln comes down squarely in favour of the grasshopper who lives for the moment in his retelling of Aesop’s famous fable. We also hear the preference of dustman, natural-born philosopher and self-proclaimed ‘member of the undeserving poor’ Alfred Doolittle for letting things take their course in My Fair Lady. The last word is with Scottish-born poet Robert W. Service, who, echoing Jerome and Mole, declares that while it’s noble enough for others to sweat, ‘pounds and dollars to get’, it’s just as grand ‘doing nothing at all’.

Producer: Lindsay Kemp