A friend sends me a copy of The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, an elegant and timely book by the Italian scholar and public intellectual, Giorgio Agamben.

I have thought for some time, in the lazy way one reverts to hobbies in moments of pique, that a solution to many social ills of the present day would be a revival in some form of the monastic life: the removal of a significant number of people from invidious consumption, a refusal of the involuntary humiliations of poverty and unemployment, the carving out of a zone of freedom beyond law, into a world in which life is not constrained by rules but is rather constituted in them.

The danger in such a fantasy of withdrawal, if translated into present realities, is that it may amount to no more than idle distraction, gap-year pootling. Worse, a sort of workfare hell, the creation of a reserve army of redundant human leftovers doing useless things, a panic-response to the discourse of strivers-and-scroungers that animates much of the right. Worse yet, to use another term of Agamben’s, his “state of exception” (this in turn related to his larger project on Homo Sacer), is the dark place beyond law, the tendency to invoke under the license or pretext of public emergency a new kind of non-being, a creation of categories of non-persons who may be freely killed or subjected to torment without limits. What is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go but a sustained warning that a state of exception in Agamben’s sense may come in the guise of a communal form-of-life whose rules have become equivalent to life itself?

Yet Agamben’s book on monastic rules shows that the dream of use without appropriation, of a space of political freedom not defined by law, was at the heart of the European project for centuries, explicit in the monastic, especially Franciscan, resistance to both secular and ecclesiastical control, a dream in the end unfulfilled and now unimaginable in any polity or form available to us.

Certain details in his account brought back to me forcefully a determinative episode in my own life, the three years I spent, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, in a so-called Bible school, an academy or training-ground for future missionaries, pastors and evangelists.

I put it this way because this is how the institution defined itself officially, and on the basis of which it received financial support from a parent denomination, not to mention the subsidies from families and home churches that supported the students directly. Thus, officially, the minute governance of daily life, the regulation of sleeping time and prayer time and eating time, the control of social encounters, the many prohibitions touching sex, alcohol, tobacco, dress and personal adornment, the emphasis on transparency in all things and the encouragement of public confession, the threat of expulsion for transgressions, were seen as instrumental in the achievement of this training mission. The rules were not only held to be of secondary importance in that context, but were subordinate, naturally, as well, to an overriding religious essentialism: to salvation, to the pursuit of holiness, to the love of God, to the fulfillment of a calling. In recollection, for many people, it is this last, the essentials, that are timeless and permanent, the rules on the other hand only the prejudices of an era, a cultural moment gone unregretted and unmourned.

Yet one may easily invert this picture. In practice, in daily experience, the rules were not felt as means to an end, but constituent parts of a form-of-life: the use of bodies and things without appropriation and self-governance without law. To have turned the Bible school I attended into a monastic order it would only have been necessary to understand the rules as constitutive of an exemplary pattern, a model, in which both the practical function and the doctrinal and cultic higher-order concerns flowed from the form-of-life and not the other way around. This form-of-life-as-rules was the greatest achievement of my school, now unrecognizable as such because we routinely relativise the natural desires and needs of human life, and essentialise the forms of law and possession.

I’ve just acquired a Raleigh DL-1 Tourist, like the one in the picture, from Mr. Bob Beechy of St George, Ontario, through an advert in an online marketplace.

Mr. Beechy proved to be one of those characters with a passion for mechanical things with whom it is delightful to discuss such a mutual interest as bicycles. He designs and makes ingenious pedal-powered vehicles with many gears, horizontal in outline, complete with fairing like an old Messerschmidt. With the Raleigh—which it will take some effort to keep as clean and shiny as he kept it—Mr. Beechy gave me a bag of spare parts, hard-to-find pads, for example, for the peculiar rod-linked brakes, an extra rear hub incorporating a coaster brake if I should want to replace the one installed.

Mr. Beechy had mentioned a documentary film of 1945 about the making of Raleighs at their factory in Nottingham, in its day one of the wonders of vertically integrated mass production in the world. We watched the film that night. It made me think of other celebrations of work: the great 1936 GPO film unit’s Night Mail, with music by Benjamin Britten and poem by W.H.Auden; the classic book of 1930 about an earlier age of craft production, George Sturt’s The Wheelwright Shop. As happens once you start these things, I remembered too the Swedish archival footage from 1932 of a wheelwright making the hub for a wagon wheel. Not exactly the mass-produced Sturmey-Archer three-speed hubs of Nottingham, but the same intelligible fitness for function, the same assumption of timelessness, the same beauty inherent in the necessary. Also arresting from the Nottingham film, images of boys, perhaps fifteen, sixteen years old, with good jobs and steady futures, making things—a way of life as gone as the bicycles they made.

Riding a bike. Was there ever anything a purer experience of freedom? A more unequivocal command of distance, of privacy, of independence? We happened to watch recently Hiroshima, mon amour, the Resnais/Duras film from 1959 with Emmanuelle Riva. What people commonly remark from that film is the opening shot, naked bodies glittering as though covered in radioactive dust. I always think instead of the scene from the flashback sequence, Riva as a girl in Nevers, on her bicycle, down a path through the trees, flying to the rendezvous with her German lover. Oui, jeune à Nevers, she remembers. Et puis aussi, une fois, folle à Nevers.