The Science of Leisure

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 116, 9 February 1929, Page 15

The Science of Leisure

MR. ARNOLD O. POWELL, M.A., Headmaster of Epsom College, recently addressed the medical students of Westminster Hospital on “Leisure.” . ~ “It is the lack of control of the time of leisure at our disposal—however small it may be—that is one of the presentday curses,” he said. <’ “Sport, theatres, kinemas, dances, motors—all have their value, but the evil tendency nowadays is to over-esti-mate that value, to Imagine that the only form of rest is slacking. Many of us, I fear, have to reach an advanced old age before the realisation comes that mental laziness may in the end prove the most tiring, the most enervating, of all human occupations. I 4 “What,, then, is leisure, how has it grown into being with the ascent of man, and what lessons can we gather from the history of its development? ‘Freedom from pressing business, as distinct from sheer indolence,’ is to me a satisfying definition of the word. Leisure, unlike indolence, presupposes work; it gives one time to study the work of others. It is definitely rest from work; it is change of work—the highest form of rest; it must necessarily follow work. “Properly employed—and it is not leisure if it is merely time wasted —it engenders more work, better work, nobler thoughts, higher ideals. And so we have the cycle complete; the storing up of latent energy which, in due course, is. to be set free in the form of kinetic energy. Then, again, the period of apparent quiescence—the recharging of the accumulator. “Let us see if we can discover the place history gives to leisure in the economic foundations of our complex national life. These foundations I think we can make threefold. . First, capital, the basis of all freedom, the , possession of which means that we have not to concentrate our thoughts on the problem of the next meal. It is the incentive of capital—in its broadest sense—that has been the basis of all the world's great movements. And why does every human being worth his salt work hard to secure capital! Because he wants with all the strength of his being that second of the foundations of which I speak, leisure. The prime object of spending—and, therefore, of amassing capital, is to secure this leisure. And then the old cycle once more—the leisure so obtained is employed for the gathering of more capital. The third foundation, of which one. could speak for hours, though we niusfl content ourselves with only passing reference, is mobility— that opposite of physical stagnation, intermittent shocks in the leisure which is the goal of all mankind. . “Pithecanthropus, the sub-man, had no leisure at all in the proper sense of the word; it was mere animal relaxation.

“The Neanderthal man could light, a fire, and knew how to shape and sharpen flints by knocking them against each other, in a certain definite manner. These last five words tell us that gradually there is now growing into the rest periods of primitive man a quality of thought, of reasoning that is transforming part of them into leisure. In the contact of flint with flint sparks were generated; one day these sparks kindled some dry sticks close by.

“Next day—perhaps some hundreds of years later to be more accurate—these sparks were made on purpose, and the flints were banged together under a pile of brushwood. Fortuitously one day a haunch of the Tension tumbled unnoticed into the blaze at the cave-mouth, was pulled out, and tasted ever so much nicer.

“Let us proceed with this mental development. Retrospection begins to appear in the lowly mind. The desire for and love of trophies is born, the head-hunter, the scalp collector, and with the desire for a permanent reminder of prowess the epic is born, history has come into being. Art has arrived to dwell with man; he dances as a physical sign of his happy memories ; rhythm, the sire of music, becomes incorporated in his leisure. “The tom-tom, the pipes, follow in natural sequence. With a bit of coloured earth he draws the reindeer he slew yesterday; on the walls of the cave he savagely cuts with a sharpened flint the outline of a mammoth that has trampled his wife to death. It is quite conceivable that the pleasure derived from this newly found use of his leisure well outweighs the ephemeral pain of his bereavement. Man has experienced the delights of pictorial art. “So far mankind has hardly tumbled out of his cradle; his thoughts though now fast developing in complexity, a're still concentrated on the concrete. But now he begins to think in a higher plane. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘was I not victorious in that last fight?’ ‘How does the thunder come?’ How? and why?—something new in his mentality, something to bring a new and vital interest into his leisure. The abstract confronts him, and imagination becomes an integral part of human development. The first ideas of some omnipotent Deity flash vaguely through his mind, and he theorises—he invents abstract thought. “Religion is born with its twin brother, science. And with advent of reasoning, concrete and abstract, we have with us tradition, the ancestor of history. But first came imagination, the sire of all the arts and sciences. In early folklore man found both the material and the beauty for the poetry that was later to gladden his soul, for the music that was to revolutionise his leisure hours. love of the sights and sounds around him, of the pictures and songs he slowly learnt to create himself, sweetened the hours that, in his strenuous existence, had to be set aside for rest.

“And so man has now solidly established leisure as a definitely purposeful part of his life. His manual labour, his hunting, his housekeeping, his fighting, though still looming large on his horizon, are now definitely, if to him unconsciously, in their proper place as a means to an end, the beauty, the happiness, the social harmony, the intellectual interplay, of human life.

“In the olden days of despotism there was no real leisure; with the gradual transformation of the people’s indolence, between bursts of manual labour and fighting, into properly organised leisure, came the equally gradual power of Corporate and individual deliberation which bore fruit in selfgovernment. Cabinet responsibility, too, was just as surely of the same growth, and also that essentially democratic system in government, decentralisation, without which the human touch is lost, and democracy gradually drifts back to the tyranny of bureaucracy.

“The British Empire, is the finest example the world has ever seen of successful decentralisation, a decentralisation which, with all its shortcomings, has brought to man .greater happiness and prosperity than any other form of .empire control. And all the ramifications of our great system of administration, our King, our Parliament, our self-governing Dominions, our county councils, our borough councils, our literature, art, music, science, all have sprung from a proper appreciation, a proper use, of that great and abiding blessing, leisure.”