Not working versus not-working

[sawyl]

Catching up on the latest on Crooked Timber, my eye was caught by this, on the philosophy of idleness:

What is missed is the distinction between doing nothing and doing something that is, from the point of view of work, conspicuously profitless – like philosophy, or walking a lobster. ‘Idleness’, applied to Socrates or Nerval, is a careless, inaccurate term of abuse, a tactical refusal to acknowledge what distinguishes the doer of nothing from the doer of something seemingly pointless. It seems to me that, when we shave off mere laziness, on one side, and various forms of active strangeness, on the other, you reduce the category of true Idleness, positive not-working, to a relatively small, hard core of soft indolence. You have to limit your cases to philosophers of Idleness.

Particularly delightfully, it led to my discovery of the wonderful word, cunctation, which I now plan on using whenever the opportunity presents itself.