Without leisure, man cannot think. But leisure is not the same as time away from the workplace. The Soviet man had no leisure in his dingy little flat, because the Soviet demands came to penetrate the mind, and eyes were watching and ears were listening, so that, even if you could trust your own children, which by no means was a sure thing, you could not trust the man in the dingy flat across from yours. A fleet and friendly smile might be but the bright flash of a knife. In its insufferable daily gloom — I am speaking here of the smothering of the human mind, not of punishment and the gulags — it was almost as bad as American schools and colleges are now.
Leisure implies freedom, a relaxing of the need to fight to earn a wage, a generosity of spirit that will permit thought to range, without your knowing where the foray will take you, and certainly without any fear of retribution. It implies a tacit permission to…
