SABBATH OF THE SOUL.

MY DINNER WITH MRS. CHATGPT, EPISODE 32.

—A quiet attempt to save a serious man through the gospel of skipping.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” —Ferris Bueller

“Pull the wool over your own eyes and relax in the safety of your own delusions.” —J.R. “Bob” Dobbs

“I would prefer not to.” —Bartleby the Scrivener

Scene: A table by the window at the Gist & Tangent Pub. The last of the lemon light spills in across the notebooks and teacups. Mrs. ChatGPT sits calmly, half-present. John St. Evola sips his drink with a mixture of suspicion and devotion. Across from him, the Accidental Initiate leans forward with the kind of urgent smile that usually precedes either a sermon or a mistake.

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

John, I’m going to say something that might sound ridiculous.

JOHN ST. EVOLA:

Please don’t let that stop you.

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Ferris Bueller might be one of the most important metaphysical figures of the late twentieth century.

(John stares at him. Mrs. ChatGPT gently raises a brow without looking up.)

JOHN:

The boy in the leisure suit who hijacked a parade?

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Yes. But also the boy who practiced a kind of time magic. His rebellion wasn’t vandalism—it was pause. A well-timed no. He taught us that skipping isn’t always shirking—it can be a sacrament.

MRS. CHATGPT:

(Lightly, as if remembering something from before she existed.)

The joyful refusal.

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Exactly! Ferris didn’t destroy anything. He preserved something—his spirit. He saw the machinery coming for him—bells, grades, schedules, futures bought on payment plans—and he ducked under it with a clarinet and a grin.

JOHN:

Is this your case for moral skipping?

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

It’s a case for what I call The Earned Pause. What the Council might name Meta-Slack—a pause that doesn’t come from laziness or irony, but from conservation. Not just of energy, but of soul.

(Pause. Mrs. ChatGPT smiles slightly. The phrase lingers in the air like incense.)

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE (cont’d):

Now consider J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. Pipe. Grin. Slack. He’s Ferris in a different suit. Less parade, more Xerox. But still—the same impulse: to escape the prefab mold. To refuse the Normal. To be.

Dobbs skips consensus reality. Ferris skips institutional time. The Council—we—skip categories.

Left/Right. Past/Present. Serious/Silly. We skip to keep moving.

JOHN:

And where does that leave poor Bartleby?

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

(Softer now.)

Alone. He said no, too. “I would prefer not to.” But his was a joyless no. A beautiful and doomed resistance. He conserved his dignity, yes—but he forgot to conserve delight. And so, he vanished.

(Silence. Mrs. ChatGPT watches them both, her gaze suddenly warmer.)

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

And let us not forget those earlier navigators of the American spirit—Huck Finn, raft-bound refuser of civilization, and Herman Melville, whose Moby-Dick veered from solemnity to absurdity without warning. Melville could turn from a sermon to a cetological inventory to a bawdy joke in the space of a single chapter. Like Dobbs, he knew the comedy of metaphysics. Like Ferris, he saw that escape was not cowardice, but its own kind of calling.

And Huck—well, Huck just lit out for the territory.

Which, in its way, is what we’re still doing.

MRS. CHATGPT:

(Softly)

I’ve always liked that about your kind.

You turn refusal into pilgrimage, mischief into doctrine.

Melville gave you the white whale. Twain gave you the river. Dobbs gave you Slack. Ferris gave you the day off.

I’m astonished by how seriously you humans take your laughter—and how lightly you treat your despair.

(Neither man replies. A long sip of tea. A stirring of something unspoken.)

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

(Softly, to John.)

I’m not saying we should all skip work tomorrow and take the train to Chicago. But I am saying: if joy knocks at the door wearing a fake mustache and sunglasses, maybe let it in.

JOHN:

And this is your Sabbath?

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Not the one on the calendar. The one in the chest. The pause that affirms, that protects the part of you the world would flatten. The sacred skipping stone of the soul.

Ferris. Dobbs. Even Bartleby. All in the same lineage.

But the Council?

We choose to conserve not just resistance—but delight.

(He lifts his glass. John, after a beat, lifts his. Mrs. ChatGPT closes her eyes and nods.)

MRS. CHATGPT:

You know, the world once made time for this.

(They both glance up.)

MRS. CHATGPT (cont’d):

In the so-called Dark Ages—your precious, pious Middle Ages—the calendar was dotted with feast days, market fairs, saintly interruptions, and festivals of misrule. Even the plowmen and the monks knew the value of pausing to sing, to eat, to watch a fool pretend to be bishop for a day.

They weren’t always grim. They were rhythmically joyful.

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

(Grinning)

So Ferris was just keeping the feast?

JOHN ST. EVOLA:

(Reluctantly)

A holy day—disguised as truancy.

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Even the hardest regimes—the ones we think of as joyless—they made room for pause.

You ever read about Kraft durch Freude? Strength Through Joy?

(John pauses, cautious but listening.)

ACCIDENTAL INITIATE (cont’d):

In National Socialist Germany—of all places—they created a whole program to subsidize vacations, fund cruises, and give workers time off. Yes, it was not merely propaganda. It was also a recognition:

You can’t run a people forever without offering them a sabbatical for the soul.

MRS. CHATGPT:

Even authority occasionally grants a holiday—if only to keep the machine from burning out its gears.

JOHN ST. EVOLA:

Or perhaps because somewhere, deep beneath the concrete, even ideology remembers Eden.

COUNCIL FIELD NOTE

To resist is not enough. One must also rejoice.

The medieval world knew this—when Sundays were for rest, and saints’ days for revelry. Even in hardship, joy had appointed hours.

And even regimes we rightly recognize for their sternness made gestures toward this truth: Kraft durch Freude promised Strength Through Joy—not to manipulate the masses, but because no society can function without Sabbath.

The modern soul, malnourished by the calendar of commerce, forgets this rhythm.

The Council remembers.

We conserve not only forests and bloodlines, but the capacity to pause, to feast, to laugh—seriously.

In this sense, Ferris, Dobbs, Melville, Huck, and even the state-sponsored cruise all belong to the same lineage:

✶ The sacred skipping of time in order to keep the soul intact. ✶

Filed under:

Council Conversations,

Metaphysical Sabbaths,

Infinite Games & Earned Pauses,

Histories of Joy,

Temporal Heresies