Jane Austen's work being my only true frame of reference on this, I must first apologize for the outstanding amount of ignorance I'm about to engage in
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I'm trying to draw a conclusion about stress reduction and long journeys when one is not in charge of the transportation mechanism. Am I full of it?
Pretty much ... ;)
Seriously, the whole focus on "relax, enjoy the journey" is a construct of the 20th century; prior to that, the XIX century was focused on progress, science, striving ere to seek, to know. It was pretty much the opposite of the 20th century - people had standards that they were expected to meet, leisure was a sign of laziness, etc.
What I've read of Hugo, Tolstoy and Austen seems to lend a strong sense of leisure to me - visiting the manor in the country, time spent in the parlor... and perhaps this is what the women did more than the men, but it seems to me that the men spent an awful lot of time riding around the country to various manors, shooting stuff, and uhm, leisure stuff.
Do I just have terribly bad examples, or examples only of a certain social caste? I hate being this ignorant, it's infuriating.
It's not ignorance so much as a lack of context ... we live in a deconstructionist age, or a "post-modern" age, so we tend to focus on "what the text brings to us" rather than the inheritance of a text - that is, what the author was thinking when he actually wrote the book
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Leisure was a sign of affluence and success, not lazyness. If you were successfull or had the right family you could engage in leisure. It was an ideal
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So I'd say that overall we're more stressed, and it has less to do with work and educational ethic than it does with what the current level of societal and technological advancement supports.What originally sparked my meandering thought process that lead to this post was very much along these lines. I was thinking about how trains, cars, planes, the internet... all have vastly improved the efficiency of travelling of people and data and how that arguably forces us to do a lot more because there is no enforced waiting time. Which got me to wandering if there is any part of modern transporation that gives something back to us which doesn't fall directly into the high stress time is money equation
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Pretty much ... ;)
Seriously, the whole focus on "relax, enjoy the journey" is a construct of the 20th century; prior to that, the XIX century was focused on progress, science, striving ere to seek, to know. It was pretty much the opposite of the 20th century - people had standards that they were expected to meet, leisure was a sign of laziness, etc.
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What I've read of Hugo, Tolstoy and Austen seems to lend a strong sense of leisure to me - visiting the manor in the country, time spent in the parlor... and perhaps this is what the women did more than the men, but it seems to me that the men spent an awful lot of time riding around the country to various manors, shooting stuff, and uhm, leisure stuff.
Do I just have terribly bad examples, or examples only of a certain social caste? I hate being this ignorant, it's infuriating.
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