In 1950 Charles Aznavour wrote a song which went on to become famous, sung by both Juliette Gréco and Edith Piaf, and perhaps others as well. The woman in the song is expressing a feeling which could be shared by many: she hates Sundays, finds them “pretentious” and rose-colored and filled with pretexts for the middle classes to parade in crowds and act smug, while the man she loves has to go to work. If only he had Sundays off, she says, she would love Sundays—and show it—so well that other people would envy her happiness.The subtext of her little musical scenario is the loneliness that Sundays inflict upon those who are neither en couple or en famille. And while she clearly sees the ritual that is behind the traditional Sunday—church, family dinners, after-dinner walks, excursions to the country or trips to museums, along with the pretense (we’re not lonely because we’re doing what normal people do on a Sunday), she also envies these traditional activities, even those who “make love because they have nothing else to do…”

When I was eighteen I wrote my first halting composition for Italian class in Switzerland on the subject of Sundays. Perhaps it sounds better in Italian—“Perchè non mi piacciono le domeniche”—than in French, but my modest tract was enough to alarm my Italian teacher, a gentle middle-aged man, one of the most humane teachers I have ever had. He called me aside after class: did I have no family, no friends to be with? Actually I did, but something in my minimal Italian must have done a superb job of conveying that eighteen-year-old loneliness: family were often too busy, or traveling, and I had not been in that school long enough to make friends with whom to spend a Sunday (it was generally a major social gaffe to call anyone outside immediate family on a Sunday). In those days, too—we are talking the late ‘60s—a Sunday was really a Sunday: filled with gray empty hours, where the only places you could find open were cinemas and a few restaurants, and bakeries that closed when they’d sold the last croissant. Most people flocked down to the lake when the weather was fine, and like Aznavour’s crowds pressed along the narrow sidewalks, showing off their furs and fashions and yappy dogs. Or rode the steamer to France. Never one for crowds, I preferred the four walls of my room. I didn’t dare go alone to the cinema or a restaurant, people looked at you strangely, and men would try to pick you up. So I would spend the day with myself and a good book.

Only a few years later Sundays became the day to flock all together with a group of friends to have breakfast and nurse your hangovers, and sometimes you would walk along the lake and gossip about who’d slept with whom, and then you’d end up in the evening at one of the few pizzerias open to finish the weekend with a flourish. But we were students then, all friends, few couples, floating in those happy days before convention and the need to make a living would crack down on us.

Sundays have greatly changed since then—although I fear in Switzerland they might be very much the same, still. But in California and much of the United States, and, so I hear, in the UK too, stores are now open on Sundays. This gives an animation to the streets—and something to do besides cinema and restaurants for bored, well-rested city-dwellers. It’s as if by eliminating the difference between weekdays and Sundays one could eliminate the negative sides of a Sunday altogether.

But as I wandered through an affluent upscale mall this last Sunday, I began to wonder if Sundays really have gone away, and spontaneously, Piaf’s impossibly melancholy voice entered my thoughts. Well, well, caro professore, guess what, I still hate Sundays. They are just as bad as when Aznavour wrote his song, or I wrote my composizione. Here are people flocking to the Apple Store for the latest iPod, or queuing for hot pretzels, or sitting in a Felliniesque crowd on the patio of The Cheesecake Factory, shouting loudly, showing their good-natured, successful appropriation of the day of rest. The most absurd to me were the people in the Container Store, buying containers for everything from their tax forms to their kitchen sponges. Spending their Sunday afternoon preparing to tidy their house because a need has been created, artificially, for them to consume extraneous household storage tools. I bought a rubber mat for the kitchen sink and a magazine full of recipes and Valentine’s Day topics like love and fidelity, and hurried out of there as if they all had the plague.

Would I not have felt the same on a Saturday? Perhaps. But it seems to me that Sunday has an added symbolic value that has largely been lost in the West. It’s not merely religious, either; it’s the notion that this is the day when you don’t work, when you leave all the nasty stuff—taxes, housework, bills—to one side, in order to get in touch with something more basic and good in life. Nature. Friendship. Love. Art. And even if some of the customers in the Container Store had been to church that same morning, there was something lonely and desperate about all those shopping carts filled to overflowing with do-it-yourself cupboards and bookshelves and storage bins, all that need to fill a vacuum, to find the perfect plexi-glass box to store that same vacuum in.

Aznavour’s heroine imagines how beautiful her life would be if only she could share it with her hard-working man. How she’d hope for nothing more than other Sundays, other Sundays…que d’autres dimanches, que d’autres dimanches…

Sundays are a state of mind. An imposition of society on one’s natural solitude, the message being, Go to church, or, Go out with your friends for a walk/dinner/movie/bike ride; above all make sure your loved one doesn’t work on Sundays.

And if you have no chéri? You still have the right to hate Sundays. Yes, they are pretentious, in that they no longer are what they should be; they try to behave like Saturdays. Personally I would like to live far away in the country, where no one knows it’s Sunday, where there are no overt signs, no ringing church bells or crowded lakesides or malls. Only the natural solitude of things in nature, where they belong.