Without leisure, man cannot think. But leisure is not the same as time away from the workplace. The Soviet man had no leisure in his dingy little flat, because the Soviet demands came to penetrate the mind, and eyes were watching and ears were listening, so that, even if you could trust your own children, which by no means was a sure thing, you could not trust the man in the dingy flat across from yours. A fleet and friendly smile might be but the bright flash of a knife. In its insufferable daily gloom — I am speaking here of the smothering of the human mind, not of punishment and the gulags — it was almost as bad as American schools and colleges are now.

Leisure implies freedom, a relaxing of the need to fight to earn a wage, a generosity of spirit that will permit thought to range, without your knowing where the foray will take you, and certainly without any fear of retribution. It implies a tacit permission to search, to look, to turn a thing this way and that, and to make a judgment. Such permission presumes that there is truth to be found and that it is good to find it. (RELATED: We Seek the Truth)
For if there is no truth, then why should not thought itself be subject to centralized control, for the sake of the common good? Necessity is the tyrant’s plea, says Milton, and its more presentable cousin Utility comes along in its train, with Safety-above-all, the harridan, given to fits of hysteria and the vapors. All these watch over leisurely thought like birds of prey. (RELATED: Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness)
Let me give an example of a thinking man at leisure.
“For fifty years France had now held the valley,” writes Albert Deane Richardson, referring not to a little cleft in the hills, but to the hundreds of thousands of square miles drained by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, west of Illinois. “By the customs of that day, it was time for bloodshed about it, particularly as it was deemed almost worthless. So the Spaniards determined to capture and reco...