If generations of peasants slaved away all their lives, surely we owe it to them that they should count on taking in idleness what they expended in effort.
My grandfather stopped working when he died: a peasant. My father stopped well before his time: civil servant, early retirement (he paid for it with a deadly hypochondria, but no doubt that was how it had to be). I never started work, having very soon acquired a marginal, sabbatical situation: university teacher. As for the children, they have not had children. So the sequence continues to the ultimate stage of idleness.
This idleness is rural in essence. It is based on a sense of ‘natural’ merit and balance. You should never do too much. It is a principle of discretion and respect for the equivalence between labour and land: the peasant gives, but it is for the land and the gods to give the rest – the main part. A principle of respect for what does not come from labour and never will.
This principle brings with it a certain inclination to believe in fate. Idleness is a fatal strategy, and fatalism a strategy of idleness. It is from this I derive a vision of the world which is both extremist and lazy. I’m not going to change this, no matter how things develop. I detest the bustling activity of my fellow citizens, detest initiative, social responsibility, ambition, competition. These are exogenous, urban values, efficient and pretentious. They are industrial qualities, whereas idleness is a natural energy.