‘The Right to be Lazy’

How gentle and lovely the music that sounds around me! How comfortably it rests itself under the blue, lightening-bright sky on the sweet smelling bed of hay. How cheerful the beaming faces of the children around me! Now some adolescent girl, with golden locks fluttering over half her face, throws a rubber ball on the end of my nose. You little pests, you thousand - -

Creak-creak-creak- Hell, the devil, and pitch!!! What creaks into my comfort with the endurance of a hard-boiled believer? Indignant I go away, gaze around me and see myself in my room, but on the wash stand sits the alarm clock and rattles away persistently on it.

‘It was once again a dream,’ I sighed melancholically. All the swearing doesn’t help at all. Into clothes and out into hostile life, to work!

But wait – today is Sunday, what’s more Pentecost Sunday. Right, I remember: last night, completely sober by the way, I wound up the alarm clock and set it for the early hour, so that I, after it shook me up with its rattling, could drowse leisurely again.

Sunday! No violent rushing into clothes! No bolting down seething hot coffee! No hanging and trembling in hovering anguish on the car strap. No sitting and sweating in the dusty office! Sunday!! I am a free man and I’ll sing – no I’d really rather not sing; because I am also a friend to men and I’ll spare the nerves of my roommates.

But I want to sprawl and stretch myself so comfortably and thoroughly savor the sweet morning rest. Oh if everyday were Sunday.

How foolish mankind is! Because they’ve struggled for a hundred years for the inviolable human right to work. Why don’t they employ the same energy for the divine right to be lazy? Why don’t they try to replace the mundane everyday and workday world with a luminous Sunday world?

Or are they perhaps even more clever than I even thought? Don’t the great endeavors which fulfill our age imply in the end that they to give people rest, which they need and wish for? The watchword of the past will not be formulated, instead of the bleak and dismal ‘You must work!’ from now on ‘You should rest yourself and you may enjoy your life!’

Resting, if it so pleases the heart, suspending work whenever a need for rest comes about, that is the goal to wish for in one’s inmost being. Living, like the enviable newspaper writer in India, who only lets her paper appear, if she feels the urge to communicate something to the readers!

‘But’ I hear wise and prudent fearfully clamor, ‘then no man would work any more, then finally all must die starving, thirsting, and freezing.’ O you of little faith, do you have so little confidence in the desire of men to create? Don’t you know that work done of ones own free will goes on far lighter and more briskly than such which the whip of the slave driver impels, than such which the bitter ‘must’ drives.

People would become exactly as tired of eternal laziness as they are on the contrary of eternal working. If the coercion to create one day falls away, they would turn themselves to action of their own free will and they would create from their own desire for work and satisfaction.

We work too much. We heap excessive value on the insane struggle of competition. We would be far more sane, if we for a long piece of time which we use for unedifying, deadening, useless work, would throw ourselves into the grass, look into the blue sky, and listen to the laughter of playing children. We would have satisfaction from life and at large no damage would happen to their welfare. So often people of the world, experienced in life, have reckoned up, that with two hours of work a day everything needed could be created for humanity for comfortable enjoyment of life. Now if ever one or the other should slack off during the week his esteemed fellow men would not suffer on his account, and for the laggard himself food, drink, and shelter would be made without extra

We have always taken life too seriously. We have always treated ourselves as higher beasts of burden, for which every pleasure indicates a kind of forgetting of duties. May the vulture takes the trite drivel of the thousands of duties, which we are supposed to fulfill, and the fulfillment of these only makes us grumpy, prematurely old, and unbearable for ourselves and others. Finally we’ll stop putting obstructing walls between ourselves and the sun day by day! Rather we’ll tear down those already standing and let all the light and warmth penetrate to comfortably resting love. We’ll take for ourselves the right to laziness and we’ll create work of our own accord.

- - There is knocking at the door. ‘The coffee is getting cold’ a sharp voice reminds. May it get cold like the heart of a profiteer! I’ll warm it up for myself later or cook it fresh. Today on Pentecost Sunday morning the holy ghost of laziness should gush over me in its whole fullness.

Go on and knock! I’ll happily drowse on.

Martin Drescher

From Freiheit 28 May 1904