“Rembi, the, feminine, singular only,” I read in the dictionary. And I think that all good things are female, after all! Remvo, remvoami, the ancient verb, a first word of physics that meant to turn, rotate in a circle, hence the rhombus. Then they put it into medicine, first Hippocrates then Galen who used the word “rembi” to express the lack of reason, the state of unconsciousness that accompanied an illness. Then they began to speak of fickle and frivolous people who wandered in, living a life now here and now there. There was also a related proverb “”he wanders in idols and shadows” which meant that he wanders aimlessly among idols and shadows, i.e. he acts at random and thoughtlessly, deals with non-existent things. Analogous to humans, words were also slurred when they were vague and undefined or unintelligible. “Synagogue of all words…” characterized the 5th AD. century Alexandrian Hesychius the rhomboid writing, which was the defective and the one without coherence, just as the rhomboid life was the unsullied life. Rembus, rembus soul and in Marcus Aurelius for the wanderer, the vagabond.
From the Middle Ages onwards, remvi, remvazu, remvasmus took on the meaning we give them today. At the same time, other words are born or transformed or borrowed from elsewhere to express alternative attitudes towards time and life, similar to rembasmos. Like the word “rebetes” which (for some, not all) suppose to have come from “remvazo”, with the rebetes being the people who let their time flow freely, wandering around in various places and not having conventional concerns of the rest of the community, the vagabonds. But also the word “vagrant” comes from the verb “alomai” which also means to wander and roam, wander from here and there, wanting to describe a type of person, similar to the one who rambles. In the 18th century in urban France, the word flaneur was coined to describe the slacker, the lazy daydreamer, the type of person whose main activity was lounging and observing his surroundings, the street, the café, the cinema the hotel, the museum, the par excellence places of the homeless.
Letting one’s thoughts wander freely has been advocated by philosophers, poets or artists. They considered the free wandering of the mind a pleasurable activity and so important that it could even be the purpose of life (or the title of their band, as in the case of “I’m getting lost because I’m wandering”). The philosopher Anaxagoras, for example, when he was invited by someone to mention “a reason for which man should live”, he replied “to him you are considered the sky and the order of the whole world”, which could also mean “to ramble”. Anaxagoras did not propose as the purpose of man’s life either the acquisition of wealth, nor the acquisition of honors and glory, but the consideration of life as it exists in nature and within us. The same thought and the same feeling was expressed by the British poet WH Davies, in the poem “Leisure” (1911), which he wrote several centuries after Anaxagoras and whose first verses in a free rendering in Greek would be: “What would be this life, if full of cares, we didn’t have time to stop and remba”. But also our Skiathos Saint of Letters, Alexandros Papadiamantis, who wrote in 1906 the well-known “Rembasmos tou Dekapetaugustos” describes the former ruler of the place Fragoulis Fragoulas, now a peaceful old man, carelessly recounting the good and bad things of his life that passed. Just as Angelos Terzakis wrote about the rembi (“he had sunk back into his rembi, and seemed to have already forgotten the presence of the stranger”), so did K. Cavafis (“inside the rembi, this is how I will visualize”).
Today, we encounter the same ambivalent attitude towards “rembas” and “rembi”. For some, most, rembass has a negative meaning, since it describes the attitude of a lazy and lazy person, who abandons his duty to work, performing poorly in production, in favor of a free time that he instead wastes without guilt. This concept is essentially consistent with Protestantism, of which it is a core value. Protestantism has prevailed as a social view, beyond religious belief, in our globalized world. For some others, on the contrary, rumination has a positive meaning and means the possibility of free thinking, the free pleasant wandering of the mind, the recalling of memories and reminiscence, aimless thinking, daydreaming. A similar positive attitude was expressed in 1880 by the political writer Paul Lafargue, who with his book “The Right to Laziness” proclaimed the universal human need for free time. Lafargue, in that book, fought against the work frenzy of his time that led people to conditions of constant and exhausting overwork: “But, cannot the workers at last understand that, by overexerting themselves from work, they exhaust themselves and their own powers and those of their descendants? That, by the wear and tear they suffer, they become prematurely incapable of any kind of work? That, absorbed, possessed by one and only passion, they are no longer human, but fragments of human beings? That they kill within themselves all the wonderful gifts, leaving standing and all-powerful the raging particle of labor?’ he was saying. Lafargue advocated the liberation of the individual from his labor bonds and associated the right to idleness with securing time for the benefit of philosophical reflection and the participation of people in the issues of life.
In this day and age rummaging, hanging out with your own thoughts that pop up when you reminisce, and actually enjoying the “company of yourself” is a valuable skill that is threatened by modern lifestyles. In modern life we are all running for something to catch, something to do, someone to see, something to pay, something to listen to, something to learn, something to read. That from the first moment we open our eyes in the morning until we close them at night, we run. Even in the moments when we are resting, even in our free time, even then, something must be done. To look and look again at the mobile phone, to check our social networks, to read what is going on in the world, even if we had already looked at the same electronic sites a short time ago. Repeatedly. “What are you doing;” they ask us. If we answer “nothing”, then we will worry our interlocutor. If we say “I run”, then everything becomes more understandable and acceptable. If you stay for an hour without doing anything, if you ramble, if you just look at the wall or the tree opposite, you must feel guilty. Let alone, if others see you staying like that for an hour, doing nothing, just looking at the wall or the tree opposite, they may even recommend “anti-depressants”. Because, in addition to the work you have to do, contrary to your duties, you choose to waste your time. It’s as if the time of rembass is a wasted life. As if the rest of life, where we are always running to catch up, is a earned life. We even nurture our children with the ideal of tireless effort. Stimuli, even more stimuli, a barrage of stimuli from the crib, lest they listen to Mozart, lest they speak as both, and more stimuli after that, and educational games and reading and music pre-education and extracurricular activities and constructive play (like the game can be something else) and DVDs and tablets and swimming pool and two foreign languages early on (because then they learn easier), our children run after us too. We run, so do our children. You must always be doing something, don’t “waste your time”, don’t waste your time. In ramblings and vagaries! What do you say?