There is a word that has almost entirely lost its meaning in our culture, and I want to try to give it back to you before summer slips away into another season of busyness dressed up as rest.
The word is leisure.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: I know what leisure means. It means time off. Vacation. The weekend. And you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that—most people in our culture use the words leisure, recreation, entertainment, and amusement interchangeably, as though they all meant roughly the same thing.
But they don’t. And the confusion, as Josef Pieper argues, is not a trivial one. In his remarkable little book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper suggests that the totalitarian work state—a society in which human beings are valued only for their economic productivity—is the clear historical consequence of our faulty understanding of leisure. That may sound alarmist. But stay with me, because I think he’s right.
Let’s consider what these words actually mean.
Recreation comes from the Latin recreare—to create again, to renew. It is what we do to restore ourselves so we can return to work. Entertainment comes from the Latin inter and tenere—to hold among, to maintain in a certain condition. We entertain ourselves by holding our attention pleasantly. And amusement comes from the French amuser—to divert one’s attention. That’s it. That’s all it does.
Every one of these—recreation, entertainment, amusement—is something we do for the sake of something else. We refresh ourselves so we can go back to work. We divert our attention so we can return, somewhat recovered, to the demands of ordinary life.
And here is what Aristotle observed with his characteristic clarity: work itself is also something done for the sake of something else.
We work so we can eat, pay our bills, sustain our families, and occasionally buy something we want. Work is noble—do not misunderstand me—but work is also, by its nature, servile. There is a reason the classical tradition distinguished between the liberal arts and the servile arts. The liberal arts were those suitable for a free man—arts which serve to free men, not from work entirely, but from the kind of existence in which nothing is ever done for its own sake.
That is what leisure is. The word comes from the Latin licere—to be allowed. Leisure, rightly understood, is not the absence of work. It is the presence of something done for its own sake—something meaningful in itself, not merely as a means to something else.
To flourish as human beings, we need to recognize that work is not an end in itself. We work so that we can have leisure—so that we can engage in those things which are good or meaningful in themselves. And that is precisely what recreating, entertaining, and amusing ourselves does not give us.
Now, what does any of this have to do with summertime? Everything!
I want to borrow an argument from C. S. Lewis that I have found clarifying on this point. In his essay “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis raises the question of why students should continue to take an interest in what he calls “the placid occupation” of learning when lives and liberties are at stake. “Is it not,” he asks, “like fiddling while Rome burns?” (a reference to the Emperor Nero, who reportedly played his instrument on the balcony while the city below him was consumed by fire.)
Lewis’s answer is worth reading carefully:
The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.
Now Lewis was answering the weightier question of why we should learn in wartime. But his logic applies equally well—inversely—to the lighter question of why we should learn in summertime.
We don’t have to wait for normal times to pursue knowledge and beauty, because there are no normal times. There is only the permanent human situation, which is always pressing, always urgent, always threatening to convince us that now is not the right moment. Lewis puts it plainly: “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable”—be it wartime or summertime.
What makes human beings different from the animals, Lewis observes, is that while animals respond only to immediate circumstances, men have always been capable of something more. They “propound mathematical arguments in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae.”
We might add: in modern times—times not threatened by war but bombarded by amusement and assaulted by entertainment—free men and women study in summertime. They don’t wait to be told they have to. They pursue the things that make them better human beings.
So let me suggest three reasons why summertime is not the enemy of learning but one of its best opportunities.
First: summertime is a defense against ordinary academic distraction.
There will always be distractions to learning—that was Lewis’s point. Sometimes the distraction is a war. Sometimes it’s a global pandemic. But for most students most of the time, it’s the competing demands of academic schedules, extracurricular activities, and institutional rhythms that prevent the kind of deep, unhurried engagement with ideas that genuine formation requires. Summertime, used well, affords real leisure—time to dive deeper into a subject, to read more slowly, to think without a deadline pressing from behind.
Second: summertime learning is a defense against the false leisure of mere amusement.
Here is where Pieper’s argument bites. The entertainment and amusement that fill most people’s summers are not leisure in the meaningful sense—they are sophisticated forms of recreation, designed to divert the attention pleasantly until the fall semester begins. But as Pieper rightly argues, if we cannot identify something worth doing for its own sake—not for the sake of a grade, a credential, a paycheck, or a screen—then we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence, and we will never be able to justify ourselves apart from our economic usefulness to society. That is a hard word. It is also a true one. Reading a great book, learning a language, studying history, cultivating a genuine intellectual interest—these are not merely fun alternatives to Netflix. They are exercises in becoming fully human.
Third: summertime is an opportunity to get ahead, get caught up, or simply resist the fog of forgetfulness
The fog of forgetfulness settles over most students between June and September. The research on summer learning loss is consistent: students who read nothing and pursue nothing intellectual during the summer arrive in September measurably behind where they left off in May. Summertime learning doesn’t have to be rigorous to be restorative. It simply has to be intentional.
Let me close with the observation Pieper leaves us with—the question this whole argument raises but cannot answer for any individual person: What is the point of leisure? What can we rightly call something done for its own sake, an activity meaningful in itself?
If we can’t answer that question, we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence. Summer is your annual invitation to begin answering it. I hope you’ll accept it!
Bonus: Try All Three of These Suggestions
Read aloud together. Not just to the young children in the home, to everyone. Pick a book that is slightly above the youngest member of your household, and read it after dinner, or before bed, or on Sunday afternoons. It doesn’t need to be a Great Book, though it could be. It needs to be worthy of attention. The act of reading aloud together is one of the oldest and most powerful formation practices in Western civilization, and it has been almost entirely abandoned. You could use this summer to reclaim it.
Second: Have one serious conversation a week. Not about logistics or family issues, but about ideas. Choose a perennial human question and put it on the table—literally, make it the dinner table. What is man? What is courage? Is justice always fair? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? The question matters less than the habit. Families that talk about ideas raise children who think about ideas. It may be rare, but it’s really not complicated. It is simply rare.
Third: Read something that is above you. I don’t mean tackle something impossible, just something slight above you, something you have to reach for. Choose something that requires you to slow down, re-read a sentence, look something up, or sit with a thought before moving on. This is the experience most of us try to avoid. We have been conditioned to move quickly, to consume efficiently, to stay in our comfort zone of comprehension. But growth happens when we pursue the edges, not in the center. This summer, try to find that edge.
