The Importance of Living – Lin Yutang

William Morrow | Philosophy, Essays

There are books that arrive at exactly the right moment, and books that arrive long before the culture is ready for them. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living, published in 1937, belongs firmly to the second category. A Chinese philosopher writing in English, addressing a Western world he found baffling in its busyness, Yutang produced what remains one of the most quietly radical books ever written about how to spend a life.

His argument is simple and devastating: we have forgotten how to live. We are too busy, too serious, too convinced that productivity is virtue. The Chinese sages, Yutang argues, knew better. They understood that the highest human achievement is not accomplishment but the cultivation of leisure, the ability to do nothing beautifully, to eat slowly, to read without purpose, to sit in a garden and watch the light change.

The book moves through pleasure with the ease of a man who has thought carefully about all of it. There are chapters on the importance of lying in bed, on the pleasures of tea, on why the Chinese regard a slight paunch as a sign of contentment rather than failure. There is a magnificent chapter on reading, not what to read, but how, and why it should never feel like work.

What makes Yutang radical rather than merely charming is his philosophical seriousness. This is not self-help dressed in Eastern robes. It is a genuine argument — made with erudition, humour, and a scholar’s precision – that the examined life is the leisurely life, and that everything we have been told about the dignity of labour is, at least in part, a lie.

The Importance of Living is a Slow Pleasure book in the most literal sense. Read it unhurriedly. It will change what you do with your afternoons.