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The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live
Roman Krznaric
4.03
727 ratings77 reviews
There are many ways to try to improve our lives--we can turn to the wisdom of philosophers, the teachings of religions, or the latest experiments of psychologists. But we rarely to look to history for inspiration--and when we do, it can be surprisingly powerful.
Showing the lessons that can be learned from the past, cultural historian Roman Krznaric explores twelve universal topics, from work and love to money and creativity, and reveals the wisdom that we've been missing. There is much to be learned from Ancient Greece on relationships, from the industrial revolution on job satisfaction, and from Ming-dynasty China on bringing up our children.
Just as a Renaissance "Wunderkammer" was a curiosity cabinet full of fascinating objects, each with a story behind it, The Wonderbox is full of stories and ideas from history, each of which sheds invaluable light on the decisions we make every day, whether we think about the different uses of the senses or changing attitudes to time.
History is usually read for pleasure or for insight into current affairs, but The Wonderbox, stepping into the territory of Alain de Botton and Theodore Zeldin, is "practical history"--using the past to think about our day-to-day lives.
GenresNonfictionPhilosophyHistorySelf HelpPsychologyEssaysHistorical
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368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
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Roman Krznaric28 books250 followers
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Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to create change. His latest book is the international bestseller The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. His previous books, including Empathy, The Wonderbox, How to Find Fulfilling Work and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 25 languages. He is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing and founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum. His new book, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity, is published in July 2024.
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Abraham Gustavson
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August 12, 2016
"Man knows himself insofar as he knows the world." This was a brilliant book, am I was so glad to have picked this one up. I devoured each chapter learning from men and women who lived life as a wonderful and strange experiment--Tolstoy, Wollstonecraft, Thoreau, Orwell--to name a few. A book can illuminate a mind, but this book helped illuminate every three pages or so. I found myself marking the side margins so I could go back and reread the lessons from history that Roman Krznaric so elegantly compiled. I have been inspired to sit down and collect all the great ideas found in this book and more importantly figure out how these ideas can help shape my life. I recommend this book to anyone who loves history and philosophy and is not afraid of little self-reflection. Brilliant.
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Rob
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September 24, 2014
It’s tempting to say—so I’ll go ahead and say it—that this is one of the first bold thrusts of a no-doubt-soon-to-be-popular kind of thinking, and we shouldn’t carp that it grows straight out of self-help literature. I’m talking about “lifestyle philosophy,” the attempt to find a way of living, though it be unconventional, that maximizes personal fulfillment and remains friendly to the planet.
Lifestyle philosophers—god forgive my language—lifestyle philosophers go beyond your typical self-help fare—remain positive, work and play well with others, exercise frequently—to question why we might wish to follow this advice—to ask, indeed, if it be the best advice after all.
A lifestyle philosopher is willing to question certain always-unquestioned premises—more is better, easier is better, faster is better, a rewarding job is naturally the best way to spend one’s life, entertainment is the best recreation—and, after a gentle tap with a hammer, knock them to the ground. Lifestyle philosophy promises the twilight for some very popular idols--if anyone takes it seriously. And it is not stamped out by the police.
So you will find nowhere a list of bullet points saying smell this or eat that. Or reach your target weight by June. Or smile as you claw your way to the top. Instead you will find discussion, always interesting though sometimes off track, that serves as prelude to the hints he offers for living a richer life. The suggestions he offers, I have no doubt, will provide a rich trove of new possibilities to those unsatisfied with their current lot, and will no doubt go down in the annals of lifestyle philosophy when such annals come to be written. (I suggest writing them in pencil.)
To name a few:
• Try to lessen the “tyranny of the eye,” and develop the other senses. This will bring a fuller love of that ambrosia of life we so often quaff without tasting.
• Carefully evaluate the place of market activities in your life, including paid employment. We all believe that time is money, that time is wasted if not exchanged for some improving medium, such as cash. At least we act as if we do. But this concept has captured us only very recently. Before the Industrial Revolution self improvement had nothing to do with labor, or money accrued. Perhaps a better quality of life is available to those who search this question.
• Give your traveling a deliberate meaning. Don’t be in thrall to your guidebook. Travel in the guise of a nomad, a pilgrim, an explorer. Krznaric offers suggestions how to do this, but the baseline intention is to add a spiritual component to your journeys.
“We ought to spend time travelling, giving ourselves enough headspace for contemplation and going at a sufficiently slow pace to appreciate the beauties and sorrows of the landscape, whether it is a mountain range or an inner-city slum. Forget the car: put on some straw sandals and start walking under an open sky.”
• Be brave enough to challenge your beliefs. As Nietzsche said, it’s nothing to have the courage of your convictions; what takes courage is to attack your convictions—an edict this book clearly takes to heart.
• Reject the social norms and develop your own perspective on the art of living.
• Find satisfaction in doing more things for yourself. In other words, be creative where you can. Cooking, for example, is a great channel of creativity and a means of self expression. And it hasn’t been taken out of the individual’s hands by an industry.
“Creativity does not require the bestowal or inheritance of genius. Above all it requires the self-confidence to believe that we are capable of finding ways to express our uniqueness.”
• Bring the shrouded aspects of life—in other words, death—into the light of day. Why can’t funerals be as creative as marriages? Why can’t we develop our own rituals of death to substitute for the festival approach to death that is now in steep decline?
It’s not difficult to range Krznaric’s book among others Instructions For a Happier Life. The difference is, he claims history as his justification. And I’m not sure it works.
I am all in favor of sleuthing out how civilization has stolen a person’s means, and eventually his desire, for expression. Commerce has co-opted the creative. Singing in public is now rarely done except before a karaoke machine. The creativity once exhibited at Halloween within living memory been replaced by a shopping opportunity. But how history can justify personal behavioral changes--how vast chronicles of the political and military movements of a people can suggest one small twitch for modification—goes beyond me. One might as well say history justifies dumping sewage in streams
Nevertheless, Krznaric is onto something big. He has opened some big questions it behooves all of us to ask. How many of our social conventions disrupt the quality of our lives? How much of what we’re taught isn’t true? Can we reject these unquestioned conventions and live better? Most important, he has rescued history from inclusion in that squash-all-debate refrain about how, no matter how awful it is now, in the past it was worse.
As Krznaric shows, it often wasn’t. For that we owe him a lot.
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Eustacia Tan
Author 15 books281 followers
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June 30, 2014
So this is the other book that I bought at the airport. It took quite a long time (other books got in the way), but I finally took the plunge and finished it! And it is an awesome book! I'm so glad that the cover caught my attention, and that I took a risk and bought it.
The Wonderbox purports to use history to help us live our present lives to the fullest. Well, if not the fullest then a little bit better. This book covers the topics "Nurturing Relationships", "Making a Living", "Discovering the world" and "Breaking Conventions" with three chapters to each topic for a total of twelve chapters. All twelve chapters are very well-written and I enjoyed every single one of them.
Instead of talking about all the chapters, I figured that I'll just talk about three of my favourites.
One of them has got to be "Work". This chapter looks at how work is what it is and how we can/should choose our work. One particular section asks whether it is better to be a high achiever (aka a specialist) or a wide achiever (aka a polymath). I didn't realise this, but primary school teachers like my mother are actually polymaths! They have to have a good grasps of the basics of many subjects, know how to handle people, write reports, etc. They truly have many skills.
Another chapter that I particularly enjoyed was "Travel". When we travel, is it a must to go to all the tourist venues, even if we don't have an interest in certain areas? By looking at the history of travel, I understood how things like the Grand Tour (which I've always wanted to take) ended up influencing the "must-visit" spots in Europe. So what is the purpose of travel anyway? If it's to broaden the mind, then it means we should open our minds to new experiences, to meet new people when traveling. It's something that I can apply right now, as I continue to explore Fukuoka.
The third one is "Deathstyle". This chapter argues that there is a need to talk openly about death, and that only by facing death can we fully appreciate life. I really enjoyed reading how other cultures (and how the past) treated death, and I think the book makes a very valid point. If we don't acknowledge the fact that we will die, it's hard to seize the initiative to live life to the fullest.
For me, this book was an immensely enjoyable read. I'm definitely going to re-read it in the future (this time in random, or only a section at a time). The only thing that could make it better if there was a companion book that focused on how Eastern culture (Chinese, Japanese, Korean culture) was impacted by history, and how we can use it to make our lives better.*
*Note: The book does mention Eastern culture at times, but the focus of this book is definitely on Western Civilisation.
This review was first posted at Inside the mind of a Bibliophile
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Elsbeth Kwant
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ReadJune 20, 2021
Wow, what a read. The Wonderbox opens with Goethe's quote 'he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth', and proceeds to draw from history's wells a number of anecdotes and habits that challenge your thinking about what you take for granted. A historical self-help manual, or 'applied history', but with enough tongue-in-cheek and nuance to be actually helpful.
The first part explores different ways of loving and concludes that where the Greeks knew six kinds of love, we tend to heap all these loves on the one stable partner, who usually falls short under this load (though not always, luckily). Serious play, ludus, is an unexpected one in the list (which is also found in C.S. Lewis work). Also, it shows we have begun to be excessively focused on our individual satisfaction, rather than giving love to another.
Then family; Krznaric explores how we often find too little time to talk, not knowing very fundamental things about the people we spend our life with (quoting the wonderful W.S. Gilbert 'it isn't so much what's on the table that matters, as what's on the chairs'). A large segment is given to empathy, a subject he knows a lot about.
Then to work: jobs are now taking up ever more of our time and thus acquire an ever growing importance in our sense of living a good life - there is no time left for other fulfillment. On the other hand - work is to gain money, not to gain quality of life. This forms a double bind - we work to gain money to buy things we have no time for. If we believe the point of work is to make money, we set ourself up for disappointment, because money (after subsistence level) does not make you happy. What does is being driven by our values, pursuing meaningful goals; obtaining respect; and using the full array of our talents. The same ideas permeate the chapters on time & money.
The next chapter deals with the sense and how the eyes have becoming the most important sense, downplaying scent and hearing, and other senses we do not even know we might possess. Travel & nature are then explored and our way of dealing with them, as well as belief & creativity. Finally, Krznaric looks at dying - a lost art.
The whole book gives prime examples of the point he is making, from Gandhi to Schweitzer, mixing in personal experiences as well. Well written and thought-provoking!
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Todd N
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February 4, 2014
Stumbled upon this book in the History section of Books Inc. in Mountain View. Picked it up despite the unfortunate title. But then again I read a fantastic biography of Montaigne a few years ago with nearly the same title. (In the UK, the book is titled "The Wonderbox," which is a marginally better title. Link below.)
It seems like a couple of these kinds of books find their way into my hands every year. It's probably some combination of fate and the fact that I'm looking for some Rosetta Stone that can translate between the daytime me and the me that lies awake at 2am.
And frankly if I'm going read self-help books, I prefer them to be written by historians and philosophers, two groups of people who gave up any hope of wild riches around their tenth year of post-doctoral work.
Lawyers, doctors, and real estate investors, the usual authors of books purporting to tell us how to live, have too high a burn rate to be trusted. Plus they aren't really the most thoughtful types from what I've observed.
But Mr. Krznaric, whose surname I've just added to spellcheck, delivers the goods in twelve brief but very thought provoking essays each covering a different aspect of life. Several of these were covered very well by Pink Floyd in Dark Side Of The Moon, but it's always good to get another perspective.
The conceit of the book is summed up by a quote from Goethe (pronounced "GERT-eh" as near as I can tell for you autodidacts out there like me): "He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." The idea here is to raid history for ideas on how to live or at least how to approach fundamental problems of living. That's where the "Wonderbox" analogy in the UK title comes from.
Imagine if Clarence from It's A Wonderful Life plucked George Bailey out of the river and said, "Screw Pottersville and Bedford Falls. No wonder those provincial jerks drove you to attempt suicide. Let's check out ancient Greece then Renaissance Italy then maybe some Buddhist pilgrims in Japan."
The prose is pretty light considering the weight of what's being brought to bear on the discussion, so (again) I had to force myself to slow down and consider what was being said. Mr. Krznaric injects his own life experiences into the essays to make points from time to time, but not enough to be obnoxious. It made the whole project feel more approachable.
The insights come quickly and some are startling because they involve things that I didn't really question or think about before.
I found the last essay to be the most thought provoking because it is about "death style." If I'm reading him right, Mr. Krznaric is making the counterintuitive point that the extraordinary recent increase in our lifespans has robbed our lives of a lot of its richness because we are willing to defer so many things. Think of the main characters of Judd Apatow movies.
Apparently "Life begins at 40" wasn't embroidered on a lot of medieval tunics. Maybe our goth friends are smarter than we think, and we could use a bit more Alas, poor Yorrick and a little less Wii. Still the idea of medieval kids playing with human thigh bones kind of squicks me out, though dans macabre murals all over Palo Alto instead of the existing crappy public art is not a bad idea.
I've been thinking about buying myself a hobo nickel for my next birthday, but now that I've read this book I realize I'll feel much better if it also serves as a memento mori.
The Wonderbox: Curious histories of how to live
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DRugh
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July 21, 2022
A literary approach to defining cultural concepts through time. Krznaric explores nurturing relationships, making a living, and discovering the world.
non-fiction
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Helena
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July 30, 2018
Cheesy title - great read. Truly. I enjoyed every aspect of this book, from the way it's set up to the soft-spoken humorous tone to it.
http://helenaroth.com/how-should-we-l...
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Totochelamouche
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February 8, 2022
But we have been bequeathed other cultural legacies that could be doing us enormous harm, yet which we scarcely spot or question, such as a work ethic in which we consider leisure time as 'time off' rather than 'time on', or the belief that the best way to use our talents is to become a specialist in a narrow field - a high achiever rather than a wide achiever.
How did the ideal of romantic love develop and shape what we now expect from a relationship? These are the kinds of questions which would have intrigued the French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld, who in the seventeenth century proclaimed, 'Few people would fall in love had they never heard about it.'
The idea of an unlimited and selfless love did not arise in ancient Greece alone, and possesses a global resonance. Theravada Buddhism advocates the cultivation of metta, or 'universal loving kindness', which goes beyond humankind to embrace love and compassion for all sentient beings, and even sometimes plant life. In Confucian thought, the concept of ren, or 'benevolence', also refers to an all-encompassing selfless form of love. Yet while agape and metta are undiscriminating, ren is a graduated love extending out from oneself in concentric circles, with the strongest love reserved for the inner circle of one's immediate family, and then progressively expanding to friends, the local community and humanity as a whole.
Nevertheless, the Greeks managed to invent a fourth variety of love called pragma, or mature love, which referred to the deep understanding that could develop between long-married couples. Pragma is about making a relationship work over time, compromising when necessary, showing patience and tolerance, and being realistic about what you should expect from your partner. [...] In the 1950s, the psychologist Erich Fromm made a distinction between 'falling in love' and 'standing in love': he said we expend too much energy on the falling and should focus more on the standing, which is primarily about giving love rather than receiving it.
Ibn Hazm's book was part of a wider Arab literature on love and sexuality, which popularised erotic practices such as the sensuous kiss on the mouth, hardly known in Europe during the Middle Ages.
Just as it is common to upgrade a phone or even a car when a new model comes along, there can be a similar tendency to want to upgrade our lover if we see a better one on offer - somebody who ticks more of the necessary boxes. There is a danger, claim some psychologists, that we may seek to maximise the quality of our romantic purchases rather than accept imperfections, and end up treating our partners almost like material possessions that we can discard at will. The overall result is that we have become excessively focused on gaining individual satisfaction - gratifying our own desires - rather than on giving love to another person.
Indeed, the popular claim that the family meal is in sorry decline assumes that we all used to happily eat and talk together around the dining table - if only we could return to the good old days. But this nostalgic utopia never existed.
That such better times are largely in our imaginations becomes clear once we recognise the three historical barriers that have stood in the way of enriching family conversation: segregation, silence and emotional repression.
But silent eating is also a cultural practice, with roots in early Christianity. The Rule of St. Benedict, which has guided the life of Benedictines and other monastics since the sixth century, asks its followers to 'avoid evil words' and spend much of the day, including meals, in silence. Dinner is a time for listening to readings from uplifting spiritual texts rather than having conversations, even about God. Such religious reverence for silence, which can also be found amongst Quakers and Buddhists, may help explain why medieval villagers spoke little while eating.
It is important when thinking about empathy to distinguish it from the so-called Golden Rule: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Although a worthy notion, it is not empathy, since it involves considering how you - with your own views - would wish to be treated. Empathy is harder: it requires imagining others' views and then acting accordingly. George Bernard Shaw understood the difference when he remarked, 'Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you - they may have different tastes.'
The most renowned proponent of homo empathicus was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow named Adam Smith. Today he is remembered as the father of capitalism for his book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Economists generally assume that Smith, like Hobbes, believed that human beings invariably pursue their self-interest. How wrong they are. Seventeen years earlier Smith had written another, now largely forgotten, book - The Theory of Moral Sentiments - which offered a far more sophisticated approach to human motivation than Hobbes's Leviathan, and was in part a direct riposte to it.
Evolutionary biology has now turned against the old Darwinian idea of the competitive struggle for existence, and instead emphasises the role of cooperation and mutual aid as an evolutionary force. Primatologists like Frans de Waal argue that the extraordinary amount of caring and cooperation evident amongst apes, dolphins, elephants and human beings, for example - such as the way mothers care for their young, or how they issue warning signals for others when predators approach - is due to a natural capacity to empathise which has developed to ensure community survival.
How can we expand our empathy in a way that broadens our personal horizons and contributes to the art of living? Unfortunately psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroscience provide few answers. To stir our imaginations we must turn to the example of real historical figures, to individuals who practised and mastered the three approaches to an emphatic life: conversation, experience and social action.
If you look back over your own life, you will probably be able to identify conversations which shattered your assumptions about people and challenged stereotypes you may have carried around for years. These are moments of empathy in action, when you get behind the facade and start to recognise the individuality of another person. They are also moments of self-understanding, offering personal insights which can shift our beliefs and open out a world of potential relationships.
Best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell also cultivated himself as an empathist, making temporary sojourns into other people's lives that inspired his writing and fundamentally changed the way he viewed the world. After a privileged upbringing in the British upper-middle classes and an elite education at Eton, in the early 1920s he spent five years in Burma as a colonial police officer. Orwell developed a creeping distaste for imperialism, and a growing self-disgust for his own part in it.
But experiential empathy should really be regarded as an unusual and stimulating form of travel. George Orwell would tell us to forget spending our next vacation at an exotic resort or visiting standard tourist sites. It is far more interesting to expand our minds by taking journeys into other people's lives - and allowing them to see ours. Rather than asking ourselves, 'Where can I go next?', the question on our lips should be, 'Whose shoes can I stand in next?'
People are more likely to care about the suffering of others in a distant place if that misfortune evokes a fear of their own. And late-eighteen-century Britons were in the midst of widespread first-hand experience with a kind of kidnapping and enslavement that stood in dramatic contradiction to everything about citizens' rights enshrined in British law. It was arbitrary, violent, and sometimes fatal ... It was the practice of naval impressment.
The Industrial Revolution and urbanisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered an ambiguous liberation from the largely static social order of feudalism. Yes, you were emancipated from serfdom and the fetters of the guilds, but now you were a guest of the bourgeois order, a 'vampire that sucks ... blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist's cauldron of capital', as Karl Marx so delicately put it. With the freedom to sell your wage labour to whoever you wished, your opportunities were largely limited to the monotony and exploitation of a factory job - or maybe independent employment in the vibrant urban economy as a 'pure finder' (collecting dog dung for tanneries) or street-seller of pickled whelks.
Today the average job lasts just four years, forcing us to make difficult choices throughout our working lives.
Unfortunately our great expectations leave us with a new quandary: how can we satisfy our hunger for more meaningful work when we are still burdened by the inheritance of the pin factory? A common answer is to find meaning and motivation through the pursuit of money. Work is approached as a means to an end rather than something intrinsically valuable, and we opt to tolerate the tedium and stresses of our jobs as a necessary cost. Money, it is believed, can be used not just to pay the bills, but to purchase our quality of life.
What are the most important forms of purpose that have motivated human beings? Four stand out in the history of work: being driven by our values; pursuing meaningful goals; obtaining respect; and using the full array of our talents.
Service has been one of the most powerful motivating values in Western history, and is rooted in the medieval Christian idea of giving service to God through good works. Europe's first hospitals, which began emerging in cities such as Paris, Florence and London in the twelfth century, were religious foundations established to serve the Almighty as much as the destitute and sick - an attitude reflected in the old French term for hospital, hôtel-Dieu, 'hostel of God'.
The possibilities for living out your social and political values in everyday work grew exponentially following the Second World War. Across Western Europe, and also in North America, there was a boom in charities, or what we now call the 'third sector' (to distinguish it from the private and public sectors).
In the past, you commonly would have had to take holy vows if you wanted your values and work to coincide.
But for later Puritan thinkers, it represented the view that each person should follow a vocation they feel drawn towards - say as a carpenter or cloth merchant - and which contributes to public welfare. In this sense, it resembled the ethic of Christian service discussed above. Monastic contemplation was no longer the ideal. 'This monkish kind of living is damnable,' wrote the Puritan clergyman William Perkins in the late sixteenth century, for 'every man must have a particular and personal calling, that he may be a good and profitable member of some society.'
This is clearly the case with the PhD degree, a nineteenth-century German invention that quickly spread across Europe and North America. [...] Subject areas have also been split into multiple subfields. Two hundred years ago science was a single field known as 'natural philosophy' [...].
A second approach to being a generalist is to pursue several careers at the same time. This was the path followed in the twelfth century by the almost impossibly talented German abbess Hildegard of Bingen. As well as founding Benedictine monasteries and being a revered Christian mystic, she was also a naturalist, herbalist, linguist, philosopher, playwright, poet and composer whose liturgical music is still performed. Hildegard's approach was close to Karl Marx's ideal vision of work, which was to 'hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic'. Today this is known as following a 'portfolio' career, where the idea is to work freelance and possibly in several fields rather than commit oneself to a single employer or profession.
Whatever strategies we try, we should endeavour to treat our working lives as experiments in the art of living, heeding the words of the nineteenth-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.'
Jews and Muslims still live by similar lunar calendars; hence the fasting month of Ramadan has no fixed date, shifting back around eleven days each year.
The invention of the mechanical clock in Europe in the thirteenth century - nobody knows exactly where or by whom - was the greatest revolution in the history of time and an event which changed human consciousness forever. From around 1330 the day was divided into twenty-four equal periods, with the hourly chimes introducing a new kind of regularity and regimentation into everyday affairs. The earliest mechanical clocks, which could be found in monasteries, were designed to tell monks exactly when to go to prayer services such as vespers and matins.
Most antique collectors today who appreciate the fine craftsmanship of Wedgwood pottery are unaware that the founder of the firm, Josiah Wedgwood, was a strict disciplinarian who bears considerable responsibility for the way time has come to dominate our lives. The factory he founded in 1769 in Staffordshire, in the English Midlands, was not only the first in the country to use steam power, but also introduced the first recorded system of clocking in. If his potters were late, they forfeited a portion of their daily wages. The timesheet soon became a ubiquitous feature not just in pottery workshops, but also in textile mills and other industries. [...] Controlling time was so rewarding for businessmen that they manipulated it wherever they could.
We are sent on 'time management' courses to make us more efficient, and are expected to meet countless 'deadlines' - a term originally referring to a line around a U.S. military prison, which if crossed by inmates would result in them being shot.
One manifestation of the 'time as a commodity and possession' metaphor is when we talk about taking 'time off' from work. This expression is essentially saying that we have given our employer ownership of our time, just as Josiah Wedgwood would have wished it. Each year the firm will give us back a little of our time, usually no more than a few weeks. This vacation period is usually referred to as 'time off'; it is their gift to us, a temporary pause in the regular pattern, in which being at work is, by implication, 'time on'.
But imagine if we thought of our leisure time as 'time on'; could it not alter the way we approach our work? We could experiment by reversing the accepted language, giving our vacations and weekends more value by referring to them as our 'time on'. In effect, we would be saying that we own our time and grant a portion of it to our employers for some forty-nine weeks each year. The result could be that we don't feel so guilty when not at work, whether we are on vacation or sick at home. We might me less willing to bring home work at the weekends: why should we be handing more of our precious 'time on' to our employer?
We have even developed the unusual habit of equating being 'busy' - short of time - with being successful. People sometimes greet each other not with the question 'How are you?' but with 'Are you busy these days?'. It is customary to reply something like, 'Yes, I'm rushed off my feet.' To respond 'No, not particularly' is considered to be self-disparaging and evidence of failure.
There are, however, cultures that offer enticing ways to expand our repertoire of approaches to time, and to discover a route to the here and now. One is the Balinese idea of time as a wheel, and another the Zen Buddhist practice of stepping out of time.
On the island of Bali, a unique fusion of Hinduism and animism has helped to create a cyclical conception of time which has been the subject of curiosity for European visitors since the seventeenth century. The calendar, called the Pawukon, comprises a series of wheels within wheels, where the major repeated cycles of five, six and seven days together help constitute the 210-day annual cycle. Conjunctions of the various wheels determine which days are of particular ritual significance. So the main purpose of the calendar is not to tell you how much time has passed (e.g. since some previous event) or the amount of time that remains (e.g. to complete a project), but to designate the position in the cycle of days. The cycles do not indicate what time it is, they tell you what kind of time it is.
One result is that Balinese time falls broadly into two types: 'full days', when something of importance happens, such as a temple ritual or a local market; or 'empty days', when nothing much happens.
Of equal importance were the enterprising Europeans and North Americans who conveyed their personal experiences of Buddhism in the East to an uninitiated audience, such as the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel. In the 1920s he spent six years studying Zen archery and meditation in Tokyo, out of which emerged his classic Zen in the Art of Archery. This book inspired a whole genre imitating his title, most notably the 1970s bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
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Nigel Hey
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August 19, 2012
I remember that when I was a small boy and ill for some reason or another, my father would bring out a drawer from some distant part of the house, bring it into the living room, and spill its contents onto the carpet. This was ordinary drawer, for it was stocked with small, intriguing objects that had no immediate purpose. A brass square unfolded into a neat magnifying glass with perfectly machined hinges. A thick, much-tarnished disc turned out to be a one-ounce copper cartwheel penny from the time of King George III. The first to be made with steam power! my dad would say with pride. An ivory spinning top had a hexagonal disc around its middle – for playing dice! There were silver threepenny bits and silver charms that probably would find their way into our next Christmas pudding. And there was more, much more, and for each item my dad could spin a different tale. It was my history lesson, and for geography I could look at the scenes of early landmarks, agriculture and industry from pictorial stamps harvested from the far-flung lands of what was then the British Empire.
I was reminded of these magical times by Roman Krznaric in his fine book The Wonder Box. Krznaric recalls that instructive play of this nature was more or less formalized in in Germany long before my time, when curiosity cabinets were stocked with items – some precious, some merely exotic -- handed down through the generations as mementoes of family life.
At first I thought Krznaric’s book was itself a wonder box. After it arrived on my desk it lay around for a month or so, untouched except for the few times I riffled through the pages and found a deliciously short and sharp story that I found interesting or peculiar– and set it down again after chuckling or saying to myself, imagine that! or setting of on some tangential stream of thought. I found myself picking up the book more frequently, lusting for these morsels of historical Turkish delight.
Then rather suddenly I learned that this book is far more than a wonder box of vignettes and anecdotes intended for casual sampling; much more, it is a distillation of information and wisdom that might well emerge from a few generations of explaining and discussing the artifacts of life and living. I had insulted it by doing so much riffling and so little reading. Krznaric has achieved the magic of writing a very serious book that is very enjoyable to read. His chapters are divided neatly into four groups of three – “Nurturing Relationships,” “Making a Living,” ”Discovering the World,” and excitingly, “Breaking Conventions.” He is an ardent student of history, and quite shows convincingly that the lessons from history can help us all to relish the art of life.
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Sammy
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April 1, 2015
About a year ago I read Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists. The take away was that the power and attraction of religion, even in an age when we flee from organized religion, is the architecture it provides to our lives--the structure of our days, our years, our views, our aesthetics. But in an age of disbelief, the old structures no longer satisfy. Rather than disregarding the need, the better approach is to use the tools at our disposal to fill it. That may mean looking to biology, philosophy, or psychology for clues to the art of living. The thing that attracted me to this book when I bought it a year ago was that it seemed unique in using history to accomplish the same goals, and its author was a founder with de Botton of The School of Life. Krznaric investigates topics like empathy, travel, work, money, love, and family and casts a critical eye on the present with the wisdom of history. How did we get here, essentially. But the problem with a history book that ranges so broadly over the history of art of living is that it can ring too simplistic. Were there really only two major developments in art after the middle ages: perspective and cubism?
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