Reading: an extract from Akshi Singh’s ‘In Defence of Leisure’

In her first book In Defence of Leisure, Akshi Singh asks and attempts to answer the deceptively simple-sounding question how do I want to spend my free time? Guided by the work of psychoanalyst Marion Milner, she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. In this extract, Singh explores the joys of reading in bed, the books you're not supposed to be reading, and the freedoms to be found in second-hand bookshops.

EVENT: Akshi Singh will be in conversation with Anouchka Grose on at 7 p.m. on Wednesday 4 June – book your tickets here. 

I’m three years old, and the bed is vast, covered in razais. My mother is reading to me, from little hardback books with glossy pages and colour illustrations. I should be at kindergarten but I am sick. My mother has to go, she has something else she must attend to, but I want her to carry on reading. When she leaves, I pick up the book she has been reading from, and discover that the words still tell a story, even with her gone. I am content. On her return, at first she doesn’t believe me, but when I read out to her, she is excited, and promises to bring me more books. My mother works in a school, and she comes home with a stack of Ladybird children’s books. When she goes to work, I stay in bed and read my books, one after the other. When my mother returns I am happy to see her, so that I can tell her about my books, and when she leaves, I am happy, because I can read.

Lying in bed reading – this is perhaps my first experience of leisure. An obligation put off, a time that is my own. Even now, this is the first thought, the first wish that comes into my mind when I think of leisure. When I read A Life of One’s Own, when I became aware that I was following Milner’s project, I thought I would follow her example in not looking for answers in books other people have written. And then I realised the futility of this, not least because my involvement in Milner’s experiments in living had come about by reading, failing to read and rereading her work. Not just that. In my words, I hear the echoes of other people’s words, and sometimes they are more myself than anything I could say.

Time Lived, Without Its Flow is a book by the poet and philosopher Denise Riley about her son’s death that considers the impact of grief on the experience of time. She writes of a literature of consolation. I read her essay the year my brother died, on my laptop in a pirated online edition. It was one of the first books I bought when I moved to London. When I started psychoanalysis, I asked my analyst if he would read it. He did. It was a book that took what for me had been a painfully inarticulate experience, and made it into something that could be thought and communicated, and so offered to the loneliness of my grief the salve of understanding.

More often than not, it is other people’s words that bring me to my own. I can’t help but turn to books to figure myself out. But the books I’ve brought into my own writing aren’t the same as the ones I’ve read to appear clever and well read. They often aren’t what I should have been reading. These are the books of consolation yes, but also of companionship, pleasure, good counsel and risk-taking. And because Milner always belonged to this category of private books – writing that gets mixed up in living – I could never treat her solely as an object of research. Her words had a way of taking me to my words. I spent days in her archives, trying to make out her elusive handwriting in the many boxes of diaries and papers that she left behind, and in the end it led me to the unopened boxes in which I had stored my own diaries over the years. It has been impossible not to get all mixed up with her.

In A Life of One’s Own, Milner describes different qualities, or styles of attention – a narrow focus, and a wide attention that wasn’t fixed on any particular object. The narrow way of focusing was valued – from school to university to work, everyone spoke about concentration and working hard and discipline. At thirteen, I tried to cure myself of daydreaming by crawling under my desk every time I caught my thoughts drifting off. That’s what the school counsellor had told us: ‘Do something uncomfortable when you find yourself daydreaming to break the habit.’ In contrast, wide attention was a way of paying attention with one’s body and mind without channelling that attentiveness into an obvious focus. It was a way of being both relaxed and present.

Many times in my life, visiting a bookshop has meant that I have been able to start again, and it is often in bookstores that I feel something like ordinary hope – that I am not alone, that something else is possible. I like eavesdropping on conversations that shoppers have with booksellers, because there is something inherently sustaining about witnessing people paying attention to each other, and booksellers often listen with curiosity and an openness to complexity that may be difficult to find in a doctor or a therapist. Like other people and institutions that play a vital role in our society, bookstores and booksellers are romanticised even as shops close down or workers are denied a living wage. The form of floating, diffuse attention-inattention that I associate with reading in bed, with browsing in bookstores pulls against imperatives of productivity, of use. But I too have felt the pressure to turn it into something more utilitarian.

A few years back, I noticed myself feeling some kind of resentment or annoyance when I was in second-hand bookstores. This was weird, because I’ve always loved second-hand bookstores – they’ve always made it easier to try out a new writer, or a new hobby, because the stakes of trying something out are lower when it is inexpensive. It was in these bookstores that I found and bought copies of Milner’s books as well as illustrated cross-stitch patterns and cookbooks by Elizabeth David. So what was my gripe? I felt that the bookstores weren’t ordered enough, they didn’t have catalogues, the books were miscategorised, something that was memoir had been shelved under psychology. I was busy, I only had my lunch break, I wanted to find what I was looking for! There is nothing wrong with second-hand bookstores, of course. The way I was feeling was a symptom of my life. I had too much to do, I had forgotten how to take pleasure in leisure – or rather, I had wanted to make my leisure efficient, and thus I destroyed it. I have come to realise that browsing in a second-hand bookstore provides a symbol, an exemplary experience of leisure as a mental state. Once I’m inside the shop, I am often reminded of interests and preoccupations that I have forgotten. I remember that I care about things, ideas, people that have nothing to do with my immediate concerns. I find that if I go to second-hand bookstores looking for something, I often leave frustrated. But when I go without expectations, I can be delighted and surprised. Before I knew it, or found the words to describe it, second-hand bookstores in every city that I’ve ever visited gave me a chance to experience the wide attention that Milner describes, the leisurely opportunity to attend to something yet want nothing from it.

Extracted from In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner by Akshi Singh (Jonathan Cape, £20). To be published on 29th May, available for pre-order now.