Doing Nothing Is The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Art

In Praise of Cafés and Inactivity: The Art of Lingering

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The worst time to be in the city is late afternoon when the cafes are all packing up. On those days when I picked a late shift at work or missed an earlier train, coming into a city full of closed cafés was like drifting through the boundless sea without a visible harbour, swayed by the constant wave to keep moving without a pause.

Fran Lebowitz in her 2010 documentary: Public Speaking said:

“It’s very important, I think, for getting ideas or thinking of new things. That comes from hanging around with other people. That life, sitting in bars smoking cigarettes, that’s the history of art¹.”

Lebowitz perfectly described the art of lingering, and there’s something deeply appealing to creative people about spaces and times that permit this aimless hanging around. In cities based around commerce, there is very little space to pause. We have to fight our way to a public park, a pub or a café that doesn’t chase us away at 2 pm. In a city centred around culture, however, more spaces permit lingering. When I was in Paris, sitting at Café de Flore, not a single waiter pressured me to move despite the long line. “We close at 22h, relax.” One of them said when he took my order.

“Action constitutes history, but it is not a force that forms culture (Han 8)².” Wrote Byung-Chul Han in Vita Contemplativa, “The origin of culture is not war but the festival, not the weapon but the adornment (8).” In a city where walking