»Waiting for the Weekend

After returning from a too-short holiday, I read Witold Rybcynski's essay on the evolution of the five-two split week, Waiting for the Weekend.

Rybcynski, now a professor at Wharton, addresses the need for separation of leisure and professional pursuits, but does not delve into why some cultures work to the point where leisure is necessary. Needing balance between the strains of careerism and the pleasures of family has become more precarious, it seems, in our moyen âge. Rybcynski is a sensitive and perceptive cultural historian, and an outstanding essayist. He has also written recently about the notion of place, both in his book Homeand in works on urban renewal.

Especially after a colleague and I chewed the fat about the American attitude of compressing leisure into the weekend, rather than taking (and enjoying!) extended holidays -- two or three weeks, or the four- to six-week holidays prevalent in post-war France and Germany, Rybcynski's book impresses me with its précis of economic and social changes that led to the week that we know and love. Although the initial changes were probably brought about through adherence to religious doctrine, more recent developments in the workweek come from economic pressures. The weekend as we formally known it accompanied the industrial revolution. At the beginning of 2006, Madrid repealed the government worker's siesta privilege, partly in reaction to changing economic pressures (read: homogenization of Western workplace culture?).

A good study of the development of the Western calendar is David Ewing Duncan's book Calendar (gloriously sub-titled: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year).