Mark Anthony Falzon Orator 2013

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Ceremony 10

Academic Oration

Monday 2 December 2013 at 1600hrs

SIR TEMI ZAMMIT HALL MSIDA

Professor Mark-Anthony FalzonB.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 expenseof work.

I sense three immediate objections. First, that what follows is tongue-in-cheek. There is

some of that but mostly Im 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 Ive

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 Im 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: youve 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

Im 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 dont 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 inTrainspotting, 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 Whytes Street

Corner Societyand was aware that at least one good book had come of hanging out

(literally at street corners, in Whytes 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 shouldnt 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 Im 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 ones 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 thats probably another story. In any case to be lost

in ones thoughts, as we say, is hardly a recipe for being merry. Rather it brings tomind 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. Thats 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. Thewords of one Prince Dado Ruspoli come to mind. Havent you ever worked?, a

journalist once asked him. No, Ive 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.

Thats 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, theres 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 dont 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 Russells 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, forthousands 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 Aquinass 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 havenot infrequently generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Broadly, Senecas take on the topic is that we ought to chooseleisure rather than simply

to endureit; 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 Ill spare you the details.

But I ought to say something about the title of Senecas piece, not least because it brings

me to the second bit of evidence. It is calledDe Otio (On Leisure).

My Latin dictionary gives otiumas leisure, vacant time, freedom from business. There

is however a Greek word that operates very much by the same principle. That word issckhol!, defined in my Greek dictionary this time as leisure, rest, ease. Which leaves us

with a problem. The wordsckhol!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 its rather holiday that comes to my twisted mind.


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I wouldnt recommend wishing a schoolchild happy sckhol!, especially not on a

Sunday morning. Theyd have a point too since neither otiumnor sckhol!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 ofextinction 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 Sakis short story in which the youngNicholas 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 sons talent for painting

wont go anywhere near the blessed school-leaving certificate. Thats 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 Bacons 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, theres 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.

Im 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, sometimesfor tens of millions. Fact is however they generally dont, 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 ones time so as to work less and stare more. By work I mean the sort of

thing that often pays well but doesnt really produce anything worth wasting ones

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.

Im 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 RussellsIn Praise of Idlenesshas 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. Happysckhol!.

Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Joseph Anthony Debono for sharing with me his

knowledge of Greek and Latin.

Mark Anthony Falzon Orator 2013

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