T. S. ELIOT wrote of the stillness “Between two waves of the sea”. Musicians know about rests in the score, and professional orchestral players are very still when not playing. They are listening, watching, and perhaps counting, but they are not resting. When they are playing, however, their bodies should be relaxed.

These musings arose while I was reading Alain Corbin’s latest offering: it’s that kind of book. Having already written a history of the wind and a history of silence, this emeritus professor at Paris I emulates his hero Philippe Ariès, the historian of death, by putting dates to his tour d’horizon on rest.

He takes us on a journey from a time when rest was associated with salvation and eternal happiness (the faithful departed rest, supine, in hallowed ground) to the “great century of rest”, from the last third of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, when the sanatorium, or “temple of rest”, was at the height of its glory. Today, he argues, “we scarcely refer any longer to rest but to moments of relaxation, with the result that fatigue tends to be replaced by an element of stress, a kind of malaise which takes the form of ‘burn-out’, for example”.

Corbin comes from a Roman Catholic background, and our journey begins with reflections on Yahweh’s rest on the seventh day and traditions associated with the Jewish sabbath and the Christian Sunday. But soon we are in the midst of those French savants who provide Corbin’s mental furniture. Pascal, Bossuet, Montaigne, Joubert, de Maistre and others line up to testify on matters such as soul boredom, quietism, and reflection. The Enlightenment project rules, but the focus is on the individual and the feelings. Diderot’s pain felt on the loss of his old dressing gown is analysed with care, as is Rodenbach’s intense feeling of boredom on Sundays in the late 19th century.

The great century of rest is said to culminate at the end of the 1950s, “the decade of sea, sex and sun”, of the advent of paid leave, and the heyday of flirting, “first conceived on the decks of transatlantic liners and in coastal resorts at the end of the nineteenth century”. So tightly argued is this short book (there are only 97 pages of text) that one goes along with such remarks. Only after Corbin’s charming narrative is over, along with the blizzard of abstract nouns beloved of the philosophes, does one ask oneself whether the heyday of flirting can really be dated with such precision. But this lively and highly suggestive book contains lessons for the Church of England, which might consider having more rests in the music of its liturgy and encouraging alert stillness during services.

Let us rest.

Dr Wheeler is a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton and a former lay canon of Winchester Cathedral.

A History of Rest
Alain Corbin
Helen Morrison, translator
Polity £12.99
(978-1-5095-6153-7)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69