'Tagged ~ you're It!'

Quentin Crisp on Doing Nothing

"For this innocent pastime I have always been severely criticised. When I was a child, my mother and my sister used to sit each side of a threadbare fire busily sewing or writing letters. I lay motionless on the hearth rug between them. At least once an hour one of them, with an irritable sigh, would ask, 'Why don't you get something to do?' I always replied, 'Why should I?'

Later in life, when strangers asked me what I did with my spare time and I told them I did nothing, they too instantly became agitated. To them even the most fatuous alternatives to idleness seemed preferable.

'But you don't really do nothing, do you?'

'Yes .'

'But you read.'

'Books are for writing, not for reading.'

'Well then, you write.'

'Not if I can possibly get out of it.'

'Don't you listen to the radio?'

'Listening to the radio is like holding a conversation with someone who is wearing dark glasses.'

'Then you watch television.'

'Seldom and never to kill time.'

But you can't just do NOTHING.'

With my back to the wall I concede that I breathe and blink. At this point my inquisitor's fury usually explodes over me like a hand grenade.' "

From 'How to Become a Virgin'

(first published by Fontana in 1981)

Elsewhere in the same work he states: "A discrepancy of modes of thought is at the heart of one kind of humour." ~ a most excellent kind too : )