Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybczynski

A relatively quick, light, and interesting read. Not a serious academic study, even though Rybczynski is a professor at McGill University. No citations or theoretically abstruse language, although I could tell that the book required some academic research.

Rybczynski begins his study with Vivaldi's The Four Seasons--the weekend is an artificial construct in comparison to the cadences of the natural world. Does the weekend mark the shift from the pastoral to the industrial? Interestingly, according to Rybczynski's research, the 7-day week has remained fairly consistent for centuries, despite various official attempts to change it; Rybczynski concludes tentatively thay "it is certainly within the realm if possibility that the seven-day week is an instinctive attempt to establish a social calendar that more or less corresponds to an internal biological fluctuation" (p.49). 

While there were prescribed days of rest (e.g. Sabbath), leisure and the modern weekend was another development. Rybczynski traces its development to the formation of the middle-class consumer and, interestingly, commercial interests. He notes that the novel--a definitive leisurely pursuit--"was, from the first, a commercial venture" (p. 92). As activities of leisure became widespread, it increasingly became a public concern, especially as taverns, pubs, and gaming houses became popular locations of leisure. This contributed to the development of institutions of public leisure like the library. As for the modern weekend, it emerged as a combination of various factors, like the concession between capital and labour and the humanitarian efforts of the Early Closing Association, whose members were horrified at the working conditions in factories.

Rybczynski goes on with his study into our contemporary forms of leisure, into leisure in some other societies, and more, but I will stop my study here. Read this off and on over a period of a couple of months; I cannot remember my varied impressions.

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