When it comes to doing nothing, style is everything. Substance, by definition, is absent. With two exceptions—Montaigne and Whitman—the most vivid chroniclers of vacant time are authors whose prose styles are tortured and anxious, effortful in a way that doing nothing never is. Consider Henry James, listless and constipated, charting the languid meditations of characters seated in drawing rooms. In every omission or aborted utterance gleams some sign of inscrutable personality; emptiness of content meets laboriousness of expression.
Or take Oscar Wilde, so gleefully disdainful of hard work, so brazenly enamored of the pleasures of the fleeting moment. One scene in The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde complained, took him “fully five minutes to write.” But his effortlessness was just appearance. As Sos Eltis relates in Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde, the dramatist's manuscript drafts show evidence of drafting, re-drafting, agonizing self-correction.
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