Ceremony 10
Academic Oration
Monday 2 December 2013 at 1600hrs
SIR TEMI ZAMMIT HALL – MSIDA
Professor Mark-Anthony Falzon
B.A.(Hons) (Melit.), M.Phil.(Cantab.), Ph.D.(Cantab.), F.C.C.S., F.R.A.I.
Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put off
till day-after-tomorrow just as well.
(Mark Twain)
My proposal to you today is that there is some argument to be made for actively seeking
a work-life imbalance, with the scales tipped firmly in favour of the second. That is to
say, I would invite you to entertain the thought that it is both wise and productive to
invest in idle leisure (I take ‘leisure’ as a synonym for ‘life’ in this usage) at the expense
of work.
I sense three immediate objections. First, that what follows is tongue-in-cheek. There is
some of that but mostly I’m dead serious. Second, that a project for a life of idleness and
leisure must be impossibly dreamy, loopy even. Maybe, but I would plead that I’ve
chosen the right occasion in that graduation night is a fine time to daydream. The third
objection is that idle leisure is the exclusive preserve of great privilege, in other words
that I’m about to try to sell to the many what properly belongs to the very few. Again, I
would urge a sense of occasion. There are many ways in which graduates and especially
Arts graduates are indeed a privileged group. Put it this way: you’ve earned your laurels
and can now proceed to take a comfortable seat.
There are two reasons (possibly three, but public confession has its limits) why I believe
I’m well placed to contribute to the topic. First, I hold a job in the Faculty of Arts, a circle
which promises to be one of the last bastions of the value of productive idling.
Unfortunately we don’t always live up to it and academics from our Faculty, including
myself, are as prone as those from others to make a perverse virtue, in principle at least,
out of working too much and idling too little.
Second, I happen to be a social anthropologist by trade. Rather like the heroin users in
Trainspotting, anthropologists spend most of their lives waiting. In 1998 I headed off to
India for several months of fieldwork. It soon dawned on me that fieldwork was
something of a misnomer and that most of my days were being spent loafing about at
temples, in shops, and at marriage bureaux. I had read William Foot Whyte’s Street
Corner Society and was aware that at least one good book had come of hanging out
(literally at street corners, in Whyte’s case). Still, my inactivity worried me no end
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and I remember writing to my supervisor in England and telling him that life was
getting desperately flat. His reply was that I shouldn’t worry about the lack of
adrenaline but that I should make sure to keep detailed notes about it. He assured me
that those notes would likely add up to some decent anthropology. In our trade the
production of knowledge requires one to hang out, to do nothing much, but also to
reflect on and interpret the nuances and richness of everyday emptiness.
This brings me to one of my key points. The type of idleness I’m interested in is
neither about hedonism nor about a pointless lazing about. With respect to the first
it can in fact be daunting, indeed painful, to have time on one’s hands. Thinkers are
not generally or necessarily a happier lot than doers. Quite the contrary, we sort of
expect the masters of the art, philosophers, to display a mannerly measure of angst even as they proceed to take it philosophically. Of course there is a performative
side to being a troubled soul, but that’s probably another story. In any case to be lost
in one’s thoughts, as we say, is hardly a recipe for being merry. Rather it brings to
mind reclusiveness, isolation, and loneliness. Course catalogues in the Faculty of
Arts ought to come with clear health warnings, ideally with graphic images of
desolate log cabins in Norway (pace Wittgenstein) or the Black Forest (pace
Heidegger).
As far as laziness is concerned, to each their own I suppose. Whether or not you become
wastrels is entirely your pigeon and also not my topic today. That’s because the type of
idleness I have in mind is both active and productive. Active, because it posits idleness as
a deliberate set of choices, a carefully-planned and cultivated life project if you will.
Productive, because it is an essential component of a scholarly and creative mindset. The
words of one Prince Dado Ruspoli come to mind. “Haven’t you ever worked?”, a
journalist once asked him. “No, I’ve never had time,” came the reply. The Prince did
have a hedonistic side, truth be told, and he was seldom out of bed before seven or eight
in the evening. (He was usually back into it, in company, by ten or eleven.) The net result
was that he went broke and had to sell off a considerable chunk of his family patrimony.
But he was also very productive artistically, writing poems, short stories, and such.
Happily, just the sort of thing our Faculty values.
That’s not the only happy outcome. Take for example student stipends. I know there are a
million arguments for their abolition. They include such noble causes as a better-stocked
University library, more funding for post-graduate research posts, and so on. Homage
duly paid, there’s at least one argument for keeping, indeed for increasing, stipends which
I think trumps the lot. The main reason why I for one am in favour of stipends is that they
promise to keep students in the lap of comfort and idle leisure. Generous stipends mean
that students don’t have to work for a living. Rather like Prince Ruspoli but without the
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risk of losing their palaces, they can dedicate their lives to other things. Sadly, it seems
most undergraduates these days fail to sit back to the occasion. I say ‘sadly’ partly
because there is something tremendously liberating in three (or thirty) years of cheap
wine, recycled clothes, and pirated music, but also because my argument is precisely that
idleness can and often does act as a prime enabler of intellectual development.
Two bits of evidence come to my defence. Certainly I am in good company. Take for
example Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness. Russell finds himself
perplexed. Even as modern methods of production (machines, basically) made it
possible for people to work less, people resolved to work more. The more rational
choice would have been to cultivate a contemplative habit of mind and to enjoy the
kind of useless knowledge that comes with it. All of which requires idleness and
playfulness of thought (not to be confused with hedonism, I emphasise). Russell is
scathing about the work ethic peddled by privileged groups and about the kind of
idleness that is only made possible by the industry of others. I quote: “The rich, for
thousands of years, [have preached] the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves
to remain undignified in this respect.”
The many others who have written about idleness include Thomas Pynchon and the
Roman philosopher Seneca. Pynchon departs from Aquinas’s term ‘uneasiness of the
mind’ (“rushing after various things without rhyme or reason [which], if it pertains to the
imaginative power ... is called curiosity”) to toy with the idea that it is in such episodes of
mental travelling – and while doing little else – that writers are known to do good work,
sometimes even their best. To Pynchon, idle dreaming is of the essence of what writers
do. They often go on to sell their daydreams: “idle exercises in poolside loquacity have
not infrequently generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue”.
Broadly, Seneca’s take on the topic is that we ought to choose leisure rather than simply
to endure it; indeed, “the one thing which might be preferred to leisure is nowhere to be
found”. This is not a literature review nor am I a classicist, and I’ll spare you the details.
But I ought to say something about the title of Seneca’s piece, not least because it brings
me to the second bit of evidence. It is called De Otio (On Leisure).
My Latin dictionary gives otium as ‘leisure, vacant time, freedom from business’. There
is however a Greek word that operates very much by the same principle. That word is
sckholē, defined in my Greek dictionary this time as ‘leisure, rest, ease’. Which leaves us
with a problem. The word sckholē sounds suspiciously like ‘school’ and for good reason
too: it is actually its origin. The meaning, however, (‘leisure, rest, ease’) reminds us of
anything but school – it’s rather ‘holiday’ that comes to my twisted mind.
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I wouldn’t recommend wishing a schoolchild ‘happy sckholē’, especially not on a
Sunday morning. They’d have a point too since neither otium nor sckholē translate in
any ready way as ‘holiday’. The word that probably comes closest is ‘sabbatical’, a
period of leave from work granted (usually to academics) for study purposes. To
many Greek and Roman thinkers that is, leisure properly goes hand in hand with
scholarship and artistic creativity. Idling and leisure ought to be enthusiastically
cultivated since they lead to just the sort of things our Faculty values. The news, you
see, keeps getting better and better.
Except the past is a foreign land and idling and vacant time are now up there with
genocide and obesity as the capital sins of our age. We suffer from a collective horror
vacui, shall we say. The rot sets in early too. I am by no means an expert in education,
nor do I have much direct experience with children. But from what I observe it seems
to me that children these days have very little free time on their hands. Idling, that
short-lived and rare privilege of our own misspent childhood, is in danger of
extinction as waking time is crammed into an ever tighter straitjacket of structures.
‘Extra-curricular’ is no longer a loose byword for freedom. Rather it is something that
goes on a kind of CV as part of the school-leaving certificate, provided it is spent
within structures that are formally recognised by the state. Learning, say, the piano is
only useful inasmuch as the piano teacher signs and stamps an official form.
The upshot is that we are making entrepreneurs, as well as plenty of opportunities for
them in the rubber-stamp industry, but not necessarily creative minds. Creativity requires
time to idle, to roam beyond the staid structures of formal education. Every child should
have their own lumber room, that protagonist of Saki’s short story in which the young
Nicholas finds his creative solace in idle daydreaming and fanciful associations with the
forgotten objects lying about the room.
I met one parent the other day who told me she was livid that her son’s talent for painting
won’t go anywhere near the blessed school-leaving certificate. That’s because he spends
his evenings painting at home but refuses to go to art school to have his talent stamped
and signed for. The best reply I could come up with was Francis Bacon’s advice to young
painters never to go to art school. Art school was for him a kind of slaughterhouse of
creativity and individuality. Bacon was no wastrel by the way. He was a prolific painter
whose works now sell for tens of millions (there, that number again).
Educashun aside, there’s something else that threatens to sabotage my programme.
Vacant time is commonly thought to wrong the economy, presumably imagined as a
heavenly being that would die if it stopped growing and that likes nothing better than
human sacrifice in the form of ever-increasing productivity and work-related stress (a
condition of the highest moral value by most contemporary accounts). The idea
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apparently is that as the economy grows we can consume more and that as we do so we
get happier.
I’m not about to preach an ascetic minimalism. Nor do I have a solution to the problem as
to whether or not mass idleness and an economy based on growth and consumption could
coexist. Pynchon wriggles out of it by saying that the products of idleness sell, sometimes
for tens of millions. Fact is however they generally don’t, at least not for that kind of
sum.
I mentioned earlier that idleness ought to be pursued as a life project. I shall now explore
two ways in which this might be done. The first is the obvious one: to engineer and
choreograph one’s time so as to work less and stare more. By ‘work’ I mean the sort of
thing that often pays well but doesn’t really produce anything worth wasting one’s
precious time for. Heart operations and teaching are not in this category; writing reports
about heart operations that go to gather dust in a filing cabinet and too much teaching are.
I’m sure most of us could get away quite comfortably with less work and that the world
would be none the worse for it.
The second involves space and things. Idling requires its specialised spaces and dedicated
props. Every home should have its dolittle corners where one can read, talk, write or
simply sit around – preferably not while zapping away pointlessly at a television set.
University is in a different category and requires whole empty continents where one can
idle. One of the tragedies of our University, possibly a necessary evil and one for which I
have no solution, is that these useless spaces are under threat and constantly being
encroached upon by useful buildings and offices. As for props, suffice it to say that the
Routledge edition of Russell’s In Praise of Idleness has a pipe on its front cover.
I cannot legitimately recommend that you take up pipe smoking. I can and do however
congratulate you and wish you all an extended sabbatical. Happy sckholē.
Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Joseph Anthony Debono for sharing with me his
knowledge of Greek and Latin.
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