Leisure: When It Becomes an Unexpected Curse

“It’s what Irving Babbitt meant when he wrote that happiness is to be found in work if at all. Or why John Adams would write that he was happiest on days he felt most purposeful.”

There used to be a band called the Talking Heads, and, in 1979, they wrote a song called “Heaven.” The interpretations of the song vary. But I have mine.

The lyrics and melody alike convey the hollowness of an afterlife where everything is perfect. Although, in the words of David Byrne, the band’s lead songwriter, “everyone is trying” to get there, perhaps they’d have reason to reconsider. As the song progresses—with its words sung almost from a distance—it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than there is something unbearably repetitive, excruciatingly dull, about a place where everything is exactly as one might want it to be:

Heaven is a place

A place where nothing

Nothing ever happens

When this kiss is over

It will start again

It will not be any different

It will be exactly the same.

The world conjured by Mr. Byrne is one that is utterly lacking in the uncertainty and sense of toil that mark the lives we currently inhabit. These are the things that, although we may bemoan them day in and day out, may be all that keep life from becoming intolerable. There’s something, it appears, terribly sad about perfection.

The Talking Heads wrap their heads around an idea that at first glance might seem counterintuitive. School children routinely dream of how they will spend their summer days, freed from the obligations of their homework and piling assignments. Workers can drag themselves to the office on the days they least want to with the consolation of a retirement free of bosses and deadlines distantly in mind. They strive alike to reach this empty reservoir of time where obligations are non-existent, and freedom reigns.