Monday — The wicked stepmother, the bogeyman, of weekdays. A 16-year-old girl shot up a school because, she claimed, she “didn’t like Mondays” — a line that had a long cultural aftertow. To be honest, though, I’ve always kind of liked Mondays — the sense of bustle and possibility; the camaraderie that everybody has about being trapped in an office or school together.
Tuesday — The most mediocre of days. In John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips, the eponymous protagonist, so attuned to weekday tedium, claims that even “if he were blindfolded, disoriented, given mind-altering drugs, and whirled round and round, he would be able to work out what day of the week it was from his mood” discusses having a particular aversion to Tuesdays — which a waiter in a Greek restaurant once told him were “unlucky.” In Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress, a girl falls out of love with her Cathar boyfriend largely because his holy day is a Tuesday and there’s something that just feels very off about it.
Wednesday — Hump day. The most quotidian and blue-collar of all days. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of the ‘hump day’ idea — there’s something about saying that out loud, or even thinking it, that guarantees that the work will all get pushed to the end of the week. But it is true that the best way to get through Wednesday is accompanied by old union songs.
Thursday — The most grown-up and sophisticated day of the week. A disproportionate number of significant events in my life seem to have clustered on Thursdays. As autumn is to seasons and old souls are to people, so Thursday is to days of the week.
Friday — Probably the single best-loved weekday. Adult humans say ‘thank god it’s Friday’ to each other and really mean it. One of the most cherished conspiracies of office life is the unanimous agreement to do no meaningful work at all on a Friday. I don’t really share in this euphoria — Friday has always felt like a very low-cal day to me — but when I was most in the grind of office life, I could almost feel something in the air shift on Friday, see the way everybody’s faces were slacker and lighter on the Friday commute home.
Saturday — A schizophrenic day. It seems to split between hedonism and solemnity, especially if you have some Jewish background. There is a great deal of beauty in Jewish Shabbat rituals — the letting in of the sabbath queen, the deep quiet and thankfulness of Saturday. Meanwhile, in secular culture, a very different aesthetic prevails: Saturday Night Fever and Saturday Night Live, the night you get sloppy drunk as opposed to merely having wine on Fridays, the night when you start to forget that you have a job or any responsibilities at all.
Sunday — Supposed to be the incarnation of heaven on earth. ‘A month of Sundays’ means something. I find it to be a little treacly, but I suppose I would feel differently if I were a believing Christian. Even for the non-believers, though, it is hard to argue with the power of Sunday: a day for children, for team sports and wilderness hikes, a day of peace.
My point here is that while each of the days of the week have a pronounced character to them, that character is culturally constituted and the week itself is a strikingly arbitrary unit of time. The year, the month, the day all follow obvious natural cycles. The week is more contrived, and with the end of office-bound life, as well as the end to a great extent of community-based life, it becomes possible to imagine a life in which the graceful rhythms of the week are no longer the critical determinant of the expenditure of energy.
I remember leaving college and having a terrible Friday night in which my cell phone did not ring once — and realized that the world of friends and fun and available community was finished; that time was now laid out as ‘a vast Sahara’ and would be until, who knows, I had made it enough to throw my own parties. I had a similar sensation when I switched to working remotely — it was the same as the shock to the system that we all went through in 2020 — with the realization that time would no longer be organized into chunks of commutes and errands, that time had become homogenous and indeterminate.
I have been haunted ever since I read it by Gilles Deleuze’s line in his 1990 essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ “that [modern] man is undulatory, in orbit, in continuous network.” This is usually understood negatively — it manifests in the white-collar Amazon employees who are never not working, in the inability that we all have to ever ‘unplug’ — but, like everything else, it has its advantages as well. At some point I realized that I could just keep working through the weekend on my own projects — that TGIF had lost its spell, that I could reprogram my inner metronome and instead of setting myself for five days on (intensely doing something I didn’t particularly want to do) and two days off (doing some glorified form of vegetating), I could be at a lower simmer and spend seven days more approximately doing exactly what I wanted to do. It must have been a similar, vertiginous feeling when electricity came in and people first started to realize that they could work into the night.
But the question still holds: of whether the week has some inherent integrity into it. The first Wikipedia article I looked at was surprisingly unhelpful — it seemed to say that just about everybody, in a surprisingly disparate range of cultures, has agreed on the seven-day week, but without explaining the underlying organizational principle. (Only the French Revolutionaries, who really did think outside the box, went to a bulky, rectangular ten-day week, but, apparently, everybody hated that.) My guess was that there was something about the seven-day cycle that aligned with the natural biorhythms of how people expended energy and then needed rest — and that this is what Genesis 2:3 is basically commemorating: God in one of his very first acts of office insisting on the day of rest, which has been a cornerstone of the Judeo-Christian work ethic and conception of time more or less since then.
My brother-in-law, though, supplied a much better explanation. His claim was that the seven-day week corresponded to the seven objects of the ancient sky — so that each day had a distinctive energy to it — and that that’s what’s still distantly remembered in the days of the week (our Thursday corresponding to the god Thor which corresponds to the planet Jupiter, for instance, and our Friday to the planet and goddess Venus). It’s a beautiful, enchanted explanation — that even though as a culture we barely think in planetary systems at all, that we still preserve that sensibility (we feel it in our bones — like Mr. Phillips, who just knows the particular vibration of a Tuesday).
As more of my life is spent in front of a screen — more of it in ‘undulatory orbit’ — there’s a sadness in moving even further from that sense of natural rhythm, of saying goodbye to Venus and Thor. But there are consolations as well. The five on / two off system never completely worked for me — it seemed to be based around punching the clock and then hitting the bar once the day workday was done and it was time for compulsory ‘leisure.’ Deleuze compares that system to a mole endlessly burrowing. Undulatory orbit suggests a different way of being — it’s slower, more languorous, more serpentine (as Deleuze puts it). It has its well-documented problems (alienation and atomization), but it’s also conducive to deciding exactly what you want, how you want to be, what you love to do, and doing that continuously, or as long as your energy allows.
Sam Kahn writes
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2024 — NOW, EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THE LOVE OF MONEY I S THE VERY R O O T OF ALL EVIL . BUT, A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, MONEY WAS YOUR BEAUTIFUL FRIEND, AS THERE WASN’T MUCH AROUND, NOR, AVAILABLE, ESPECIALLY, TO YOUNG FOLK .
WE SAVED PENNIES, WHICH TO US, COULD BUY A WHOLE LOT : TWO COULD BUY A COLD COKA COLA. BUT, IT COULD TAKE WEEKS TO FIND TWO PENNIES. WE HAD PENNY BANKS.
WAIT LONG ENOUGH, AND, YOU COULD BUY AN ICE CREAM FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD ICE CREAM TRUCK - .04 CENTS…!!! MOMMA MIGHT HELP ONCE IN A WHILE.
EVENTUALLY, WORKING AT TWELVE, I SLOWLY FILLED UP MY MEXICAN HAND-PAINTED PIGGY BANK ! I TOOK IT TO THE BANK, AND, DEPOSITED $5 IN THE BANK! THEY SENT ME STATEMENTS IN THE MAIL, IN MY NAME, FROM THEN ON. IT SLOWLY GREW!!! MY EVERY PENNY WAS SAVED, AND, WENT INTO “THE BANK “.
AT HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION, BY SELLING MAGAZINES DOOR TO DOOR EVERY YEAR, AND, WORKING AT THE LOCAL CLOTHING STORE FROM AGE TWELVE, I WAS ABLE TO GO ON OUR HIGH SCHOOL DRILL SQUAD GROUP BUS TRIP TO WASHINGTON, D.C. !!! THEN I EVENTUALLY BECAME AN AIRLINE STEWARDESS . “EVERYBODY HAS TO DO THEIR PART “!!! GENERAL PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
I LOVED YOUR EISENHOWER PIECE — I WAS BORN IN 1945 . IT WAS A PERSONALLY DEEPLY EMPOWERING LIFE, BEGINNING WITH THE RADIO EVERY DAY. WHAT A TRULY MAGNIFICENT FATHERLY HERO, .. GENERAL EISENHOWER,
WAS TO EVERY ONE - A PATTERN WE ALL WANTED TO COPY, AND, ASSUMED THAT EVERYONE ELSE WOULD TOO . AS I WAS A GIRL, MY FATHER FLATLY REFUSED TO ALLOW ME TO FOLLOW MY HIGH SCHOOL APTITUDE TESTS TO GO INTO THE MILITARY . I REALLY WOULD HAVE - “ EVERYBODY SHOULD ALWAYS B E L I K E I K E !!! ”
SMOOTH AS SILK . FULLY TRUTHFUL , AMERICAN, … RELIABLE … !!! HE ALWAYS KNEW EVERYTHING.
I LOVED IKE - LIKE I LOVED
M Y OWN FATHER … !!!!!!!!
EVERY PENNY AFTER THE WAR WENT TO “THE WORKING MAN “; WHAT A TRANSITION !!
I HAD AN UNCLE THAT WAS NOT LOCATED FOR FOUR YEARS AFTER THE WAR , TOTALLY D-DAY “SHELL-SHOCKED” IN A HOSPITAL IN FRANCE. HE REMAINED LIKE THAT UNTIL HIS DEATH, CONTINUALLY, STILL FIGHTING ON THE BEACHES AT NORMANDY WHERE WE WERE SHORT OF MEN. ! ! ! EIGHTEEN - YEAR - OLDS ARE KIDS, ESPECIALLY, BACK THEN, REALLY KIDS ..…!!!!!!