Pleasure-focused pastimes such as reading fiction are being sacrificed for productivity-boosting pursuits. Anna Moloney, in repose, defends idleness against the cult of self-betterment In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a long and important ritual of making pieces of sand art called mandalas, in which monks intricately and painstakingly assemble millions of grains of sand to form precise geometric designs memorised from Buddhist texts. The process can take several weeks to complete due to the intricacy of the patterns.
Traditionally, even the sand itself is made by the monks, ground from calcite stones collected from the mountains and combined with coloured dyes. Once the design is finished, after days or weeks of devotion, the mandala is destroyed in one swift sweep, representing the transitory nature of the material world; in other words, the whole process is a big waste of time. I am no monk, but time-wasting is something I can vouch for and here, even in the productivity-driven west, I believe I have found my own type of mandala: reading books and never thinking about them again.
This is a strange affliction, considering I am a bookish person, have two literary degrees, and even call myself the books editor of this fine magazine . And yet, for as long as I can remember, I have regularly suffered from such literary amnesia, where I can read a book, immensely enjoy it, and then immediately sweep all traces of it away from my mind as I shut the final page. Plot, characters, moral.
