Century illustration (Source image: Fug4s / iStock / Getty)
When I was 14, my after-school and weekend job was to garden for a reclusive 78-year-old woman who lived in a grand Tudor estate. Mrs. Morse never trusted me with a task greater than pulling tiny weeds from endless expanses of pea gravel, so gardening still feels like too celebrated a term for that tedium. After watching my every move for hours through her window, she’d come out at the end with her pocket purse and pay me $2.50 an hour. I’ll never forget the oddity of her wardrobe. No matter what hour of the day, she wore a pastel blue bathrobe with matching slippers.
Fast-forward four decades to the church I serve where, in my early years here, a retired ER physician ran a drug house across the street. I’d stand for long periods of time in a darkened Sunday school room waiting to snap photos (for the police) of him dealing at the curb. His was a tragic story, sitting on his front stoop day after day, always in a bathrobe, preparing for the next car to pull up.
In 19th-century Russia, wealthy, lazy members of the noble class suffered from what some referred to as the disease of khalatnost. A. N. Wilson, in his Tolstoy biography, describes the symptoms of khalatnost as “the idleness, the moral inertia, the sense of futility . . . literally the ‘dressing-gownness’ of those who loll about doing nothing and thinking futile thoughts.” A khalat was a plush household robe worn by indolent aristocrats.
