Waiting for the Weekend by Witold RybczynskiViking, 1991

Despite the title, and despite the fact that much of this book tells the story of how the weekend as we know it came into being, Waiting for the Weekend isn’t just about Saturday and Sunday and how they got that way. It also examines larger questions of leisure: what is leisure, anyhow? And how do work and leisure and recreation and play interrelate? To start with an answer: leisure, as Rybczynski defines it, is not “an antidote to work”—that would be recreation, which “carries with it a sense of necessity and purpose” (p 224). Leisure, following the ideas of GK Chesterton, is the freedom to do nothing, but above all the freedom to think and to reflect. So if leisure is the freedom to do nothing, where does leisure fit into the modern weekend, the regularly-scheduled two-day break many of us have, into which we often try to cram as many activities as possible? This is something Rybczynski touches on but doesn’t really answer—the answer being, I guess, that there’s room for leisure if you make room for leisure, though some don’t: “the weekend has imposed a rigid schedule on our free time, which can result in a sense of urgency (“soon it will be Monday”) that is at odds with relaxation” (222). Relatedly, as work becomes less skilled and more service-oriented or clerical, we we end up in a situation where “for many, weekend free time has become not a chance to escape work but a chance to create work that is more meaningful–to work at recreation–in order to realize the personal satisfactions that the workplace no longer offers” (225).

In writing about what leisure is and how free time came to be parceled out into Saturdays and Sundays, Rybczynski writes a lot about the history of the week and the history of the weekend, all of which is really interesting precisely because it’s the sort of thing that many tend to take for granted. As Rybczynski puts it: “Because my free time was personally enjoyed, I imagined that it was personally regulated, but this was not quite so. True, I did what I thought I wanted, but certainly not when I wanted; I dutifully arranged my recreations to fall in step with the regularly scheduled weekend intermissions that were accorded me. Not that I felt this was an imposition. It was done so automatically, it seemed so normal, that I never gave the presence of the weekend a second thought—it was simply the way life was” (10). But this isn’t the way life has always been. For one thing, the seven-day week isn’t the only way that we could divide our time: unlike the year or the month or the day, the week has no astronomical significance. And there were plenty of ancient calendars that had repeating periods of something other than seven days. The ancient Egyptian calendar had ten-day periods related to the fact that the stars the Egyptians used for night-time timekeeping changed at ten-day intervals. The Athenians had ten-day divisions in their calendar as well. The Romans had special days with irregular spacing— the first of the month, the fifth or seventh of the month, and the thirteenth or fifteenth of the month. The Chinese calendar involved a 60-day repeating period, and so on through a number of other times and places. By the time of the Julian calendar, Jews had long used a seven-day calendar, but its origin isn’t known. And the seven-day week wasn’t an original feature of the Julian calendar, but it was adopted not that long after. Because there isn’t any written record of a reason for its adoption (no edict from the Roman emperor, no debate among scholars), the guess is that the seven-day week was adopted as a matter of superstition, because the ancients saw seven moving “planets” in the sky and assigned each one to a day, which resulted in a seven-day cycle.

From the origins of the week, Rybczynski talks about different kinds of special days, days on which certain activities—including but not limited to work—are proscribed: a concept that has recurred in cultures and places from ancient Egypt to Judaism to the South Seas—and then talks about the idea of Sunday as taking something from this sort of “tabooed” day, but also being a celebratory holy day, more or less celebratory in different cultures at different times. So how did the special day of Sunday (for British Christians) turn into the weekend? Partly, it was due to prosperity. Of the 18th century, Rybczynski writes: “For the first time in their lives, many workers earned more than survival wages. Now they had choices: they could buy goods or leisure. They could work more and earn more, or they could forgo the extra wages and enjoy more free time instead. Most chose the latter course. This was especially true for the highly paid skilled workers, who had the most economic freedom, but even general laborers, who were employed at day rates, had a choice in the matter” (112). He goes on to note that “Whenever people had a choice in the matter, however, work was characterized by an irregular mixture of days on and days off” (113). Over time, though, there emerged a pattern of “keeping Saint Monday,” i.e. not working on Mondays (in part to recover from Sunday drinking), a pattern that was stronger in some trades than others. At the same time, railway travel was becoming more widespread, and short getaways by train were being marketed to the public. This, combined with opposition to the “Saint Monday” custom and the Sunday drinking that went with it, led to a push for Saturday to be made a half-holiday in Britain. The Saturday half-holiday familiar in Britain was adopted, later, by the US: a sentence like this was surprising to me because I’d had no idea that office-workers used to work on Saturdays: “By the 1930s, most offices in New York City closed their doors at noon on Saturday” (p 135). And from there, the conceptual jump to a full weekend isn’t long.

After focusing mainly on the UK and the US at first, Rybczynski shifts the discussion to the adoption of the two-day weekend elsewhere, including Solidarity-era Poland, Fascist Italy, and Japan. He talks, too, about pastimes and about weekend “retreats,” country campgrounds/trailer parks where working-class families go for the weekend in the summer, and the long heritage of the idea of an escape from the city—from Pliny’s countryside villas to Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon. These last chapters sometimes feel like they’re not so well-connected to the ones that came before, but that’s a small criticism for a book that, on the whole, is pretty pleasing.

(Hey, look, this is the fifth book I’ve finished from my list for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge!)