Rest
This is not a call for a return to the divine or the premodern, we only aim to contrast what was once common sense with what has now become radical.
Image credits: Romeo ve Juliet'in Ölümü by Gustav Klimt, 1884-87
We rest throughout the week. Stolen pockets of time here and there. Our two-hour lunch break between classes on Tuesday. Our Thursday afternoon runs. Saturday nights with the girls. This time, to us, is sacred, yet we can’t remember the last time we’ve dedicated a full day to rest. We struggle to remember distinct events as they occur, each “thing” passes into the next and becomes an endless gradient of fleeting occurrences.
We ask our siblings, peers, lovers, when was the last time you rested?
What do you mean by that? They say.
We fear we don’t know how to rest anymore. What is rest, anyway?
Across human cultures and history, time has been experienced and conceptualised in a multitude of ways. However, under the Late Western Empire, time is understood as commodity and currency. We spend time, we waste time, we quantify time in terms of countable units: hours, minutes, and seconds. We speak of time as fact, an unvaried and measurable quantity. With a digital planner, it is possible to pre-ordain one’s entire day. Perhaps more worryingly, is our capacity to “optimise”. The modern clock has quantified our days, encouraging us to do more rather than to rest and to embrace the empty spaces of time. When time becomes mere information — that is, sequential units understood as fact — it loses its naturalistic quality.
When it comes to rest, we distinctly do not mean the time spent recuperating to work later, but something different. Work is not the reason we need to rest, and the two must be kept separate. Rest should be an all encompassing point of closure, a period of tranquillity and quiet where we stop chasing one sensation to the next. Rest occurs in a space where time is ordained. Rest considered in this way proposes an alternative structure of time, one where time is allowed to become untrue, transcendent, and contradictory.
The word rest is derived from the Old English ræst, then raestan of Germanic origin, meaning league or mile, and referring to the distance after which one rests. Rest in this original sense is understood as a state of completion. One travels a period and rests, but this does not presuppose further travel.
In music, rest is defined as a period marked by the absence of sound. Music requires rest, empty time from which new sound can arise. Music without rest is merely noise. John Cage’s 4’33” is a modernist composition that instructs performers to not play their instruments for all three movements of the piece. But 4’33” negates the purpose of rest by making it an activity. In typical modernist vein, Cage makes rest profane. Once again, rest becomes something to do.
Likewise, God, the Christian composer of the universe, required rest for his composition in the book of Genesis. In the beginning, the universe is at rest, there is nothing but a formless void from which the void of Earth arises. For the next six days, God creates. He is dedicated to the creation of the tangible — days, nights, trees, moons, and humans alike. Then, God rests and sanctifies the seventh day. Rest is integral to the creation story; without it, there is no creation. It is precisely rest that brings about the conclusion of all creation.
In the Disappearance of Rituals, Byung Chul Han offers an illuminating critique of our cultural attitude towards rest. When we blur the temporal boundaries between work and rest, we render the sacred as profane:
“God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.”
The Sabbath too, calls for silence. When the Sabbath is celebrated, German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig says we must rest “from the everyday chit-chat” and learn silence and listening. On this day, the absence of sound allows for tranquillity and internal reflection. Furthermore, we evoke the primordial image of the caveman. For the caveman to go into a place to rest was to exit the world, pass through the mouth of the earth and dwell somewhere entirely separate before returning.
It is in caves and in shelters that we record humanity’s earliest artwork. Then, later, art is subordinated for religious purposes in Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues. In these spaces, the eye is meant to come to rest on the art. To luxuriate in its meaning while one communes with the sacred. There is an intrinsic link between the sacred, rest and art. Robert Smithson, in an interview with Allan Kaprow, professes that, “...I think I agree with Flaubert’s idea that art is the pursuit of the useless…” (What is a Museum, 1967) Art arises from a state of spending time without aim. Doing nothing without technology. To be clear it is only in a state of rest that dreams arise.
Now, we live amidst constant noise. We take the metro everyday, and scarcely do we see people sitting in silence; earphones or headphones as a sign of voluntary closure to the external world. Silence has no place in the digital world, but rest is only possible in spaces of silence. Of course, it is technology that has made us perpetual consumers; eyes affixed to the screen. The phone invades our space of rest. Considered by many an extension of the arm, the phone is a tool of constant distraction that makes the art of rest impossible.
This is not a call for a return to the divine or the premodern, we only aim to contrast what was once common sense with what has now become radical. Similarly, in the age of technology, the solution is not to renounce the phone in order to create the adequate space for rest. It is to achieve some sort of independence from it.
In Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951), he writes: “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.” There is something quite radical about the Sabbath in its sanctification of time. But also something so simple and paradoxical: if six days a week “we seek to dominate the world”, then why is it so difficult to dedicate the seventh day to “dominate the self”? Why does a practice so ancient feel radical, even countercultural now?
The slow death of rest may have begun alongside the death of God. In Nietzsche's Gay Science (1882), where he famously pronounces “God is dead”, he meditates on the disappearance of rest in his own time:
“… Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages - one lives like someone who might always 'miss out on something'. 'Rather do anything than nothing' - even this principle is a cord to strangle all culture and all higher taste…”
By the death of rest, we mean that today, time bears no unique meaning. Under our current regime of time, there is no rest, only varying degrees of doing. The development of increasingly accurate clocks has made all time quantifiable, commodifiable, and spendable. Days blend into each other and are deprived of their distinctiveness. Rest is therefore defined by its purposelessness and lack of value; rest is the ultimate anti-activity, the antithesis of work, which demands that we produce and do tirelessly.
In this sense, to embrace rest as ritual is in a way, anarchic. It proposes a new temporal structure that threatens the established order of modern society designed to engineer a world of capital-producing workers. We find it difficult to rest because we don’t live in a community which embraces the creation of empty spaces for rest. We live in a capitalist society that fails to ritualise the practice of rest. There is always more work to do, you hear people complain. 9–5, five days a week: yet, controlling employers also expect a prompt email response at 11pm, and you have to take up a couple hospo shifts on the weekend too. You work and study full-time, six days a week, but by Sunday you’re so tired and overwhelmed this sacred day of rest is spent rotting in bed, a slave to the algorithm.
It is difficult to change our conceptualisation of rest when the cultural hegemony informs us that our primary purpose is to work and produce. Optimisation, production, and ceaseless performance trumps all other values. But what if we did spend one seventh of our lives living on a different time?
We would need to embrace rest as a ritual. To borrow the words of Byung Chul Han, who uses a Hegelian phrase, rituals are “symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” They represent the values upon which a society chooses to live, a form of transcendence distanced from the self. When we live according to rituals, we develop a community without communication. In other words, rituals, in their drumming repetition and sameness, reveal what communities value without explicitly communicating anything. Rest is possible on the individual level, but perhaps it is more important to be a part of a community that values rest, and the creation of space for lingering and contemplation.
Of course, various cultures and religions have experimented with the Sabbath for millenia. The Jewish Shabbat is famously associated with a list of do’s and do-not’s: do clean your home, do take a long bath, do prepare an extravagant family meal; do not use technology, do not work or engage in the 39 categories of labour.
Whatever this ritual may entail is completely up to you. We simply leave you with these ideas, and hope that we can progress towards a new social morality of time. To embrace rest as ritual means to rest with intention. To mark time for time to flow without the tyranny of the clock.