The Arcades Project - Operi

a product of chance, and have about them the essential interminability that
distinguishes the preferred obligations of the idler. The fWldamentally unfinishable
collection of things worth knowing, whose utility depends on chance, has its
prototype in study. [m2,1]
Idleness has little about it that is representative, though it is far more widely
exhibited than leisure. The man of the middle class has begun to be ashamed of
labor. He to whom leisure no longer means anything in itself is happy to put his
idleness on display. [m2,2]
The intimate association between the concept of idleness and the concept of
study was emboclied in the notion of studio. Especially for the bachelor, the studio
becanle a sort of pendant to the boudoir. [m2,3]
Student and hunter. The text is a forest in which the reader is hunter. Rustling in
the underbrush-tlle idea, skittish prey, the citation-another piece "in the bag."
(Not every reader encounters the idea.) [m2a,1]
There are two social institutions of which idleness forms an integral part: tl,e
news service and nightlife. They require a specific form of work-preparedness.
This specific form is idleness. [m2a,2]
News service and idleness. Feuilletonist, reporter, photographer constitute a gradation
in which waiting around, the "Get ready" succeeded by the "Shoot;'
becomes ever more important vis-a.-vis other activities. [m2a,3J
What distinguishes long experience from immediate experience is that the former
is inseparable from the representation of a eontinnity, a sequence. TI,e
accent that falls on inlillediate experience will be the more weighty in proportion
as its substrate is remote from the work of the one having the experience-from
the work distinguished by the fact that it draws on long experience precisely
where, for an outsider, it is at most an inullediate experience that arises. [m2a,4]
In feudal society, leisure-freedom from labor-was a recognized privilege. In
bourgeois society, it is no longer so. What distinguishes leisure, as feudalism
understands it, is that it communicates with two socially important types of
behavior. Religious contemplation and court life represented, as it were, the
matrices through which the leisure of the grand seigneur, of the prelate, of the
warrior could be molded. These attitudes-that of piety no less than that of
representation-were advantageous to the poet. His work in tum benefited
them, at !east indirectly, insofar as it maintained contact with both the religion
and the life at court. (Voltaire was the first of the great literati to break with the
church; so much the less did he disdain to secure a place at the court of Frederick
the Great.) In feudal society, the leisure of the poet is a recognized privilege. It is
only in bourgeois society that the poet becomes an idler. [m2a,5]