On a wonderfully hot day, as summer was in its last throes, I recently went up to the pool in my building. It’s a small, shallow pool located in a relatively confined space on the roof of the building. That day, the seating surrounding the pool – all the chairs and loungers and benches – was full, and there wasn’t even much room for me to set my towel down on the ground. I found a small space by the edge and, after warming up in the sun for a bit, wadded into the water. This act made me an exception. As usual, the pool itself, even despite its modest size and the near-capacity crowd, didn’t have a lot of people in it. As during previous visits, only a small fraction of the people that went up to the pool actually went into the pool.

People would drink and eat, chat, read, talk on their phones, or just sunbathe. Some symbolically dipped their feet into the pool, and some went only so far as the gesture of wearing a bathing suit. In spite of this, what was clear to me was that the pool was essential to everyone’s experience. Even the person talking the whole time on her phone on a bench in the shade was having an experience centred on the pool in some attenuated way. This person could have been doing the exact same thing pretty much anywhere. And yet if I imagined this same rooftop without the pool, her and our whole situation would have been totally different.

I was reminded of an anecdote I once heard about baseball. The person said that he once went to a baseball game and was at first bored. He looked around and couldn’t understand why all the people were there. They weren’t even paying attention to the game, just eating and drinking and talking to their friends. Then he laughed as he realized that that was actually the point. Most of the people were there not because they found the game per se interesting but because it provided the setting to indulge in these other pleasures. The function of the game was to supply the pretence of doing something. In some sense, they were watching baseball, but that was sufficiently slow and uneventful that they were at liberty either to engage with their companions or simply to relax. The baseball was at once secondary and yet essential to the experience.

A lot of leisure seems to have this quality, in which you are at once engaged in something and nothing. As with the person in a bathing suit who never actually goes into the water, the engagement could be only notional. It might be that we feel guilty for devoting time fully to certain leisure activities that are seen as trivial or vacuous, and so we feel compelled to superimpose them on another activity. But in many cases, this base activity isn’t particularly productive either; sometimes, it’s just occasionally sipping from a cup of coffee. Instead, it might be that the nature of some leisure activities is such that they are best engaged in obliquely, as secondary to something which is supposedly the focus. The veneer of activity seems to liberate us to be at leisure. Similarly to how Jean-Paul Sartre observed that absence can have its own, particular kind of presence, there is a kind inactive activity that seems to form the basis of certain types of leisure.