"Nowadays, we tend to spend our breaks in gyms and spas, where taking time out and unwinding are geared toward regenerating labor and increasing efficiency. Capitalism has rediscovered the cardinal sin of idleness as a rich source of revenue. Yet only when idleness tips into true leisure does taking time out cease being but a coffee break within the production process (and thus, still governed by it), becoming a genuinely free time instead – the net dividend of being alive.

"How best to describe such leisure? Perhaps as an instance of memory? For leisure means neither doing nor letting be; leisure means being. Time extended, a vague sense of sinking, sleeping with our eyes open – leisure is certainly closer to happiness than busyness. It allows us to drift into a different temporal dimension where the punch clock doesn't exist. For a brief period, the 'fast and furious' are no longer our business. There's a beautiful old word for it: laggardness. Laggardness is a state hailing from an age when time still had fringes, as it were, when it hadn't yet been completely harnessed and functionalized, when it hadn't yet been reduced to a means to an end. Children are laggard; no object, party convention, or train can ever be laggard. And even though 'laggard' may carry negative connotations (implying laziness, or neglect of duty), it does denote those blissful forms of slowness that we typically only indulge in when we are alone.

"No clock can measure laggardness, this state of self-oblivion that, just like the word itself, will soon, it seems, be forgotten. Dwelling on the outskirts of time, it borders on the land of dreams. Building castles in the air, floating downstream in a boat gently rocked by the waves of forgetting, gazing at the clouds – this kind of slowing down enables us to reach beyond waiting, which is not only rife with anxiety and lack but also with the happy anticipation of its own closure, with the possibility of being wholly present without consciousness. That's the promise of sleep."