Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Art of the Wasted Day

By: Patricia Hampl
Narrated by: Patricia Hampl
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

A spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydream.

The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated 18th-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of "retirement" in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne - the hero of this book - who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.

Hampl's own life winds through these pilgrimages, from childhood days lazing under a neighbor's beechnut tree, to a fascination with monastic life, and then to love - and the loss of that love which forms this book's silver thread of inquiry. Finally, a remembered journey down the Mississippi near home in an old cabin cruiser with her husband turns out, after all her international quests, to be the great adventure of her life.

The real job of being human, Hampl finds, is getting lost in thought, something only leisure can provide. The Art of the Wasted Day is a compelling celebration of the purpose and appeal of letting go.

©2018 Patricia Hampl (P)2018 Penguin Audio
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

World Enough & Time cover art
Hometown Tales: Glasgow cover art
My Reading Life cover art
Distant Star cover art
Look at the Harlequins! cover art
My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright cover art
Greek to Me cover art
Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology cover art
Atchison Blue cover art
Reading My Father cover art
The Great Good Thing cover art
Thunder and Lightning cover art
The Song Before It Is Sung cover art
Spinster cover art
Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse cover art
Istanbul cover art

What listeners say about The Art of the Wasted Day

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.