Working hours
I don’t know about your summers, but here in The Netherlands we are experiencing a stifling heat wave. July is set to become the hottest month in the history of Dutch metereology. I just took a short break from editing my dissertation after lunch, lingering in the small shaded courtyard of our university building with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. John Aubrey’s description of a typical Hobbesian day’s work caught my eye. His schedule seems very attractive, especially the power nap after lunch:
He rose about seven, had his breakfast of bread and butter; and took his walk, meditating till ten; then he put down the minute of his thoughts, which he penned in the afternoon. [...] He was never idle; his thoughts were always working [...] His dinner was provided for him exactly by eleven. [...] After dinner he took a pipe of tobacco, and then threw himself immediately on his bed [...] and took a nap of about half an hour. In the afternoon he penned his morning thoughts. [Introduction by J. C. A. Gaskin, Oxford World Classics, 1996]
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
6 Responses to “Working hours”
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Wonderful news! Did you know Descartes used to spend the mornings in bed, engaged in ’systematic meditations’? Yeah right, an American would say. Four hours a day is apparently enough to produce some memorable works…
I know that your blog is of a different nature than mine. Yet as we will both occupy the same land very soon -i’ll be in Amsterdam shortly- I think you will find my blog to be of interest.
I will intertwine academia, awe, the unsuspected and life into one insane blog.
The Nuss
Have a good journey to Schiphol, Nuss. I hope you have a great time in Amsterdam! Here’s a nice site with Amsterdam Hotspots to welcome you to the city.
Re: Hobbes he also found time to play tennis (presumably real tennis, nothing as Joan Hunter-Dunn-ish as lawn tennis) and yet he managed to translate Homer and Thucydides, write a history of the Civil war (Behemoth) and leave a few permanent marks on political thought. Of Descartes something similar can be said.
Perhaps they had such enviable working hours because they wasted no time watching tv.
Ah now, there’s a thing: wasting time watching TV. I ‘ve decided to do away with the thing so often I cannot remember. I once managed to keep it locked in a closet for a couple of weeks, until my longing for images got the upper hand. Terrible thing, TV.
Yes it is, isn’t it? At first I thought that without a tv-guide I wouldn’t watch it so often, but actually not knowing what’s on involves one in endless channel-swimming.
Now I’ve found that if I just watch the programmes I want to see, such as University Challenge, and leave it switched off the rest of the time I save time to do other things.
Still there is a point to what you say; we’ve gotten so used to background noise (in a broad sense of noise) that reading silently or just listening to music (say Handel, to keep it early modern) demands a kind of concentration that is unusual, don’t you think?