Leisure for Thought
Without leisure, man cannot think. But leisure is not the same as time away from the workplace. The Soviet man had no leisure in his dingy little flat, because the Soviet demands came to penetrate the mind, and eyes were watching and ears were listening, so that, even if you could trust your own children, which by no means was a sure thing, you could not trust the man in the dingy flat across from yours. A fleet and friendly smile might be but the bright flash of a knife. In its insufferable daily gloom — I am speaking here of the smothering of the human mind, not of punishment and the gulags — it was almost as bad as American schools and colleges are now.
Leisure implies freedom, a relaxing of the need to fight to earn a wage, a generosity of spirit that will permit thought to range, without your knowing where the foray will take you, and certainly without any fear of retribution. It implies a tacit permission to search, to look, to turn a thing this way and that, and to make a judgment. Such permission presumes that there is truth to be found and that it is good to find it. (RELATED: We Seek the Truth)
For if there is no truth, then why should not thought itself be subject to centralized control, for the sake of the common good? Necessity is the tyrant’s plea, says Milton, and its more presentable cousin Utility comes along in its train, with Safety-above-all, the harridan, given to fits of hysteria and the vapors. All these watch over leisurely thought like birds of prey. (RELATED: Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness)
Let me give an example of a thinking man at leisure.
“For fifty years France had now held the valley,” writes Albert Deane Richardson, referring not to a little cleft in the hills, but to the hundreds of thousands of square miles drained by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, west of Illinois. “By the customs of that day, it was time for bloodshed about it, particularly as it was deemed almost worthless. So the Spaniards determined to capture and recolonize it.”
I am quoting from Richardson’s article, “Free Missouri,” from the March 1868 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Richardson would be fatally wounded that December by a jealous ex-husband, and the trial would make for a sensation across the country, but that is another story.
What journalist in our time could write those sentences about the coming fight for land considered of no use? I am not speaking here about talent but about a cast of mind, a freedom to pass judgment and not to have to worry about who might take offense, and the confidence to take the measure of human passion and folly. Richardson goes on in the same manner. “The French settlers were few and weak,” he says, “but the Missouri or Mud Indians, who have given name to the river and the State, were their staunch allies. Like all our aboriginals they took kindly to the easy, gay, music-loving Frenchman, but not to the cruel Spaniard or the grasping Saxon.”
Richardson himself was a Saxon, a Union spy during the recent Civil War, and in the 1869 article, he will describe the bounty of that land so rich, though when Jefferson bought it for fifteen million dollars, the leaders of public opinion thought it was a colossally bad deal. They thought the same when William Seward, one of our two or three greatest Secretaries of State, secured the purchase of Alaska from Russia. In any case, Richardson, a proponent of westward expansion, sets out quite clearly why the Indians so often allied with the French against the English, and his sympathies, lightly expressed, are with them.
This too, when he notes that the Frenchmen in the new town of St. Louis lived half like those Indians and that Protestants were not permitted to “own a lot, or even enjoy public worship.” Richardson was no Catholic. He and the Irishmen of Tammany Hall detested one another heartily. When he lay dying of the ex-husband’s bullet — the murderer was a hard-drinking Irishman who had beaten his wife — the liberal minister Henry Ward Beecher came to his bedside to marry him and the woman in question.
Yet he shows real appreciation for ways that were far from those of his social class. He says of St. Louis:
The little city was neither prosaic nor unimportant. The mercurial Frenchman and his Creole descendants observed frequent holidays; the cedar floors creaked with merry dancing to the violin, and the Mississippi learned by heart the old home songs of the Seine and the Rhone. The public records and judicial proceedings were in French. It was almost the only language spoken in the streets. The citizen wore buckskin moccasins in winter, and often went barefoot in summer.
To sum it up, “he looked picturesque and half barbaric; but his heart was light, kindly, and honest.” Notice that Richardson simply remarks as if in passing that the Frenchman would have “Creole descendants,” because, in fact, the French and the Indians often married. Sacagawea, we should remember, was the wife of Toussaint Charbonneau, a rather raffish French trapper and bigamist, who seems to have won the teenage girl at a game of cards.
We know Sacagawea from her presence on the expedition undertaken, at Jefferson’s instance, by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to “explore the vast region stretching to the Pacific, and to learn whether a route for travel and commerce could be opened across the American continent.” Richardson notes that nothing was heard from Lewis and Clark for over a year. They were presumed dead, and “as usual, wise after-prophets shook their heads and averred that the attempt had been foolhardy and mad.”
Of course, the wise after-prophets — a terrific coinage, that — were shown to be colossally wrong, the west was opened up, St. Louis lost her French language and her priests, and “like his good friend the Frenchman, the Indian also went to the wall before the post-office and the newspaper.” They rose up in battle against the white settlers, in vain, as “all were exterminated except a few stragglers, who found homes among the Osages, their ancient foes.”
An entirely new way of life was thus introduced into this great territory. The French, Richardson notes, mainly kept to fishing and trapping. But
the Daniel Boone race of American pioneers began to come in — men who loved the forest, and were cramped for elbow-room if they had a neighbor within a day’s journey. They were long, gaunt settlers from Kentucky, Illinois, Virginia, and Ohio, with a few restless Yankees from the hills of New England. Avoiding towns, they pushed back into the interior. They found the valleys and prairies — reputed worthless and uninhabitable — all ready to yield boundless crops of corn and wheat, fruits and the root vegetables.
Far from pounding the cedar floors as they sang and danced to the fiddle, as the Frenchman did, these settlers, according to Richardson anyway, were wary of human interchanges. What they wanted was land to farm, and a lot of it, and that was what they got, or made. And an acre that might have fed one man with rabbits and pheasants and the occasional deer would now feed a hundred with bread and beets and potatoes.
Not at all do I suggest that hot issues of the day would be treated with serenity and forbearance. Richardson has a good deal to say about what happened to anti-slavery journalists in Missouri and Kansas, in the years leading up to the Civil War.
The point is, rather, that most of human life had not yet been subject to political action, oversight, and reprisal, nor was the human mind yet subject to the constant noise — wheedling, nagging, sneering, seducing, distracting — of engines of mass marketing and mass opinion-making, everywhere, every hour of the day. That meant that you could think.
It did not mean that you would think. Human beings are creatures of the herd, after all, and the more sociable you are, the more you desire to be agreeable, the more likely it is that you will pick up your “thoughts” from people around you, as surely as you pick up the twang of their accent, without even knowing that you have done so. But at least thought would be possible, and enjoyable.
I suspect that if I met Albert Deane Richardson, I would find him a spirited companion and that we would be free to enjoy each other’s observations and laugh at each other’s folly. Call it replacing the intellectual smog of our current universities, schools, and workplaces with the clear skies of the Midwest.
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