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Alain Corbin

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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Rest occupies a space outside of sleep and alertness: it is a form of recuperation but also of preparation for what is to come, and is a need felt by human and animal alike. Through the centuries, different and conflicting definitions and forms of rest have blossomed, ranging from heavenly repose to what is prescribed for the modern affliction of burn-out. What has remained constant is its importance: long the subject of art and literature, everyone understands the need not to disturb the aimless, languishing, daydreaming Lotus-eater.

Not viewed simply as an antidote for fatigue, for a long time rest was seen as the prelude to eternal life, until everything changed in the nineteenth century and society entered the great ‘age of rest’. At this point, the renowned French historian Alain Corbin explains, rest took on new therapeutic and leisurely qualities, embodied by the new types of human that emerged. The modern epicurean frolicked on beaches and soaked up the rays, while melancholics were rejuvenated in pristine sanatoria, the new temples of rest. Paid holidays and a widespread acceptance of the need to build up the strength sapped during work followed, while the 1950s became the decade of ‘sea, sex and sun’.

This new book, as original as Corbin’s other histories of neglected aspects of human life, pans the long evolution of rest in a highly readable and engaging style.

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Seitenzahl: 148

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

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Leseprobe

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Sabbath and Heavenly Rest

Notes

2 Eternal Rest, the Foundation Stone of This History

Notes

3 Rest and Quietude

Notes

4 Retreat and Retirement in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, or The Art of Being Able ‘to Forge’ a Tranquil Rest for Yourself

Notes

Interlude: Charles V

Notes

5 Disgrace, an Opportunity for Rest

Notes

6 Rest in the Midst of Confinement

Notes

7 The Quest for Comfort: New Approaches to Rest in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Notes

8 Prelude: Rest in the Midst of Nature

Notes

9 A Rest for the Land

Notes

10 Sunday Rest and ‘the Demon Rest’

Notes

11 Fatigue and Rest

Notes

12 Therapeutic Rest from the End of the Nineteenth to the Middle of the Twentieth Century

Notes

Conclusion

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Begin Reading

Conclusion

Index

End User License Agreement

Pages

iii

vii

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

A History of Rest

Alain Corbin

Translated by Helen Morrison

polity

This English translation © Polity Press, 2024

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6154-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023951557

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Fabrice d’Almeida, my editor, and Estelle Cerutti for her meticulous work on this book. Thanks also to Sylvie Le Dantec for her work on the manuscript and, as always, for her invaluable support.

Introduction

‘Ah, if I’d only been capable of setting up my own business, I’d be comfortably stretched out on my back by now, taking things easy.’ These words struck a chord in me. It was in 1977, and I was talking to a family friend. It was that idea of lying flat on your back, doing nothing and simply allowing your thoughts to wander. It reminded me of a novel called Les Allongés, written in the 1930s. Set in a sanatorium in northern France, the novel focused on the lives of bedridden patients each facing their illnesses in different ways. When I was at boarding school, the period between the two masses each Sunday, the only time for rest in the whole week, was supposed to be spent writing letters to our families … All these little fragments came drifting back to me, reminding me of different ways of recuperating, now long forgotten.

Saying, or simply thinking ‘I need to rest’ is the expression of a desire, a feeling which we instinctively consider as the manifestation of a fundamental need, for both men and animals alike, which in a sense should belong outside the realm of history. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Definitions and depictions of rest have varied continually over the course of centuries, often intertwined and overlapping, or even clashing with one another. Clearly, there is no common ground between the desire to one day obtain eternal rest and that of simply getting enough rest to keep ‘burn-out’ at bay.

As a child, I remember the frequently repeated phrase ‘Don’t disturb him, he’s resting.’ There was something solemn, almost sacrosanct, about such moments. Yet it was clear that the person concerned was not asleep. So, what exactly were they doing? Later, during my military service, our behaviour was ruled by three different commands: Attention!, Present arms!, At ease! These were repeated at each drill or parade and were associated with three clearly defined postures. ‘At ease’ was not an invitation to rest but simply implied a slight relaxation, as in sport when there is a pause between two exercises. An easing off, in other words. This book is not about those specific moments which mark a break between two activities. Rather, its intention is to examine the concept of rest as understood by our ancestors and to explore the intense experiences sometimes associated with it.

The book does not set out simply to bring together the results of the various studies on this subject, which are in any case relatively limited in number. Instead, by choosing to take an overview, our aim is to identify how depictions of rest and techniques of rest developed and multiplied over time by attempting to identify the high point of each of these and to chart their subsequent decline. This approach will highlight certain specific periods within the context of a history made up of multiple overlapping layers, of innovation and of inertia, and in the form of ‘cultural flotsam and jetsam’.

Such was the importance of rest in times gone by that it permeated all forms of artistic creation. Paintings depicted scenes where individuals were shown withdrawing into themselves, all toil set aside. Literature also, as we shall see, portrays such moments. However, in this book, I wanted to focus in particular on sources taken from outside fiction in order to measure how social and human beliefs on this subject gradually took shape. As a result, except for some rare exceptions, I have avoided reference to novels.

The aim is therefore to embark on a journey leading from a time when rest was associated with salvation – in other words, with a state of eternal happiness – to the ‘great century of rest’, which, for the sake of simplicity, extended from the last third of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Following that, at varying intervals of time, came the new hedonistic image of the beaches with the triumph of rest in the sun symbolized by the fashion for sunbathing and tanning, the therapeutic rest advocated in sanatoriums, those new temples of rest, and the growing importance, in France, of the demand for paid holidays, seen as a period of rest intended to remedy the fatigue brought on by work.

In order to chart this journey, we must first retrace our steps to the very origins of rest and travel back to biblical times and that far-distant era when the Western world was created.

1Sabbath and Heavenly Rest

For many ordinary people, the belief that, after the Creation, recounted in Genesis, God ‘rested’, was long seen as the foundation and the justification for resting on the seventh day. This belief refers to the sabbath rest of the Jews, as exhorted by various commands set down in Exodus, Leviticus and the Book of Numbers, though not in Genesis. This supposed rest taken by God, a belief shared by many ill-informed Christians, is not, according to the Church, that of a weary creator. Any such suggestion would be erroneous, since it would be at odds with the idea of God’s perfection and his eternal nature and would reduce his status to the level of that of some of his creatures. In the eyes of Christian theologians, ‘God’s rest’, celebrated on the first day of the week rather than on the seventh, is a ‘creative pause’ which initiates a ‘fresh infusion of energy into creation’, the beginning of a cycle. In short, rest, in this context, does not correspond to an absence of activity.1

Nevertheless, the instruction urging the faithful to rest on the seventh day is reiterated in the Bible. In Exodus, Yahweh tells Moses: ‘Speak to the sons of Israel and say, “You must keep my sabbaths carefully, because the sabbath is a sign between myself and you from generation to generation to show that it is I, Yahweh, who sanctify you. You must keep the sabbath, then; it is to be held sacred by you.”’2 This holy word which orders the observation of the sabbath makes it both a sign of the Alliance between God and his people and a sacred time which enables the faithful to be made holy. Yahweh’s words to Moses do not stop there: ‘The man who profanes it must be put to death; whoever does any work on that day shall be outlawed from his people.’3 The severity of the sanctions is proof of the importance God attaches to the sabbath as a day of rest, particularly as he reiterates the call for the death penalty. ‘For six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath for Yahweh your God.’4 These verses define the meaning conferred on the seventh day in Jewish history and which Christians would take as their inspiration – albeit, it should be emphasized, in a modified form. This is not a day of rest purely in terms of relaxation but, above all, a day devoted to God, one which seals ‘a lasting Covenant’ and represents ‘a Covenant in perpetuity’. Without exception, all Christian authorities emphasize that Sunday rest makes this a holy day.

In several of the following books, Yahweh repeats the command. So, for example, in Exodus, he specifies that on the seventh day you shall rest, ‘even at ploughing time and harvest’.5 Above all, he emphasizes once again that it will be ‘a day of complete rest, consecrated to Yahweh’.6 What is important is not complete rest but the holy nature of that rest. ‘You must not light a fire on the sabbath day in any of your homes.’7

God returns to the subject in Leviticus. He reiterates his commands and makes the sabbath the day ‘for the sacred assembly’,8 thereby extending the significance of this seventh day.

The commentators of the Jerusalem School demonstrate what, in their opinion, constitutes the significance of the Christian Sunday: for the faithful, this coincides with the first day of the week (see chapter 10), when thanks are given to ‘he who creates and re-creates the world …, he from whom came eternity’.9 It is important to recognize the way in which Jewish and Christian biblical interpretations are intertwined.

Let us return to the Bible and, more precisely, to Leviticus. In this book we read about the creation in every seventh year of ‘a sabbath for Yahweh’, ‘a year of rest for the land’. The creation of this period of time associates nature with the notion of rest.

When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land is to keep a sabbath’s rest for Yahweh. For six years you shall sow your field, for six years you shall prune your vine and gather its produce. But in the seventh year the land is to have its rest, a sabbath for Yahweh. You must not sow your field or prune your vine, or harvest your ungathered corn or gather grapes from your untrimmed vine. It will be a year of rest for the land.10

Furthermore, this ‘sabbath of the land’ will be accompanied every forty-nine years by a year of jubilee, preceding the fiftieth year, in the course of which the land will once again lie fallow. This period of rest for the earth deserves emphasis even though, according to the biblical commentators, it only applies specifically to the Holy Land and, consequently, Christians would not follow this command.

It was important to point out here the much reiterated biblical origin of the founding of the sabbath as commanded to Moses, a day Christians would transform into a Sunday and which would be a day of rest because it is one consecrated to God the creator.

Let us return to a reading of Genesis in order to turn our attention to another form of rest: that enjoyed by man, newly settled at the centre of the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden. Indeed, it was the original sin, followed by the Fall and then the punishment of Adam and Eve, which resulted in man’s mortality, the revolt amongst animals leading them to tear each other apart, and the obligation to rely on painful toil in order to survive. To make my point all the more clearly, let us turn to the most famous epic poem of the seventeenth century, Milton’s Paradise Lost. The author gives a powerful account of the significance and the nature of heavenly rest and describes how man found himself deprived of it immediately after the Fall. His work represents an important contribution to the shaping of the imagery of rest and therefore deserves to be included in this study.

Milton depicts a specific form of heavenly fatigue and, at the same time, describes a type of rest unknown to man. During the day, Adam and Eve spend their time tending the garden: ‘Under a tuft of shade that on a green / Stood whispering soft, by a fresh fountain.’ Milton describes how:

They sat them down; and, after no more toil

Of their sweet gardening labour than sufficed

To recommend cool Zephyr, and make ease

More easy, wholesome thirst and appetite

More grateful …11

A subtle economy which defined a rest enhanced by a gentle fatigue – radically different from that which would, after the Fall, force them to seek rest. At the heart of the earthly paradise, rest was simply something to be desired, something which represented, in a sense, a ‘gentle need’, and which would be echoed in the rest taken by Adam and Eve in their ‘bower’ of leaves, inaccessible to all other creatures.

While the animals were playing: ‘as they sat recline / On the soft downy bank damasked with flowers’;12 and

Handed they went, and, eased the putting-off

These troublesome disguises which we wear,

Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,

Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites

Mysterious of connubial love refused.

During all of that time they were alone– a fact which colours this rest with a particular emotion. Adam and Eve knew nothing at that time of other beings.

Night falls and, addressing himself to Eve, Adam draws links between their exquisite rest and that of nature: ‘Fair consort, the hour / Of night, and all things now retired to rest / Mind us of like repose.’13 For God had ensured that, for the man and the woman, work and rest, just like day and night, would alternate with each other. That said, the other creatures, with no tasks to accomplish, have less need for rest than man because, at the heart of the earthly paradise, the latter has a task assigned to him.

Milton continues with a hymn exalting conjugal love, associated with the nocturnal rest of the whole earth and experienced in a place safe from intrusion, except by the serpent. On the day following their punishment, when they were forced out of their earthly paradise, the first thing the unhappy couple did, according to Milton, was to ‘choose their place of rest’.14