Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Chesterton has already confessed his puzzlement at this sort of attitude: “There are some who complain of a man doing nothing; there are some, still more mysterious and amazing, who complain of having nothing to do. When actually presented with some beautiful blank hours or days, they will grumble at their blankness. When given the gift of loneliness, which is the gift of liberty, they will cast it away; they will destroy it deliberately with some dreadful game with cards, or a little ball… I cannot repress a shudder when I see them throwing away their hard-won holidays by doing something. For my own part, I can never get enough Nothing to do.”

The poet Reverdy said: “I need so much time to do nothing that I have none left for work.” This is a good definition of the poetical activity, which itself is the supreme fruit of the contemplative life. However much we should value the contribution of Martha attending to the household chores, we must always remember that it was Mary, by simply sitting at the feet of the Lord, who chose the better part. What the vulgar call laziness can in fact reflect better judgement and demand greater inner strength and spiritual resources than the facile escape into activism. La Bruyère put it beautifully (but I despair to convey in translation the rhythm of the most perfect classical French prose): “In France you need great inner strength and vast learning to do without official position or employment, and simply stay home, doing nothing; almost no one has sufficient character to do this with dignity, or to fill their days without what is commonly called ‘business.’ And yet the only thing that the wise man’s leisure lacks is a better name: meditation, conversation, reading and inner peace should be called ‘work.’”

From the earliest antiquity, leisure was always regarded as the condition of all civilised endeavours. Confucius said: “The leisure from learning should be devoted to politics and the leisure from politics should be devoted to learning.” Government responsibilities and scholarly wisdom were the twin prerogatives of a gentleman and both were rooted in leisure . The Greeks developed a similar concept — they called it scholê ; this word literally means the state of a person who belongs to himself, who has free disposition of himself and therefore: rest, leisure; and therefore, also, the way in which leisure is used: study, learning; or the place where study and learning are conducted: study-room, school (actually scholê is the etymological root of “school”). In ancient Greece, politics and wisdom were the exclusive province of the free men, who alone enjoyed leisure. Leisure was not only the indispensable attribute of “the good life,” it was also the defining mark of a free man. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks rhetorically, “Are we slaves, or do we have leisure?”—for there was a well-known proverb that said “Slaves have no leisure.”

From Greece, the notion passed to Rome; the very concept of artes liberales again embodies the association between cultural pursuits and the condition of a free man ( liber ), as opposed to that of a slave, whose skills pertain to the lower sphere of practical and technical activity.

These views were maintained in European culture. Samuel Johnson was merely stating the evidence of common sense when he observed that “all intellectual improvement arises from leisure.” But a century later, Nietzsche was to note the erosion of civilised leisure under what he considered to be a deleterious American influence: “There is something barbarous, characteristic of ‘Red-skin’ blood, in the American thirst for gold. Their restless urge for work — which is the typical vice of the New World — is now barbarising old Europe by contamination, and is fostering here a sterility of the mind that is most extraordinary. Already we are ashamed of leisure; lengthy meditation becomes practically a cause for remorse…‘Do anything rather than do nothing’: this principle is the rope with which all superior forms of culture and taste are going to be strangled… It may come to a point where no one will yield to an inclination for vita contemplativa without having an uneasy conscience and feeling full of self-contempt. And yet, in the past, the opposite was true: a man of noble origin, when necessity compelled him to work, would hide this shameful fact, and the slave worked with the feeling that his activity was essentially despicable.”

Now the ironical paradox of our age, of course, is that the wretched lumpenproletariat is cursed with the enforced leisure of demoralising and permanent unemployment, whereas the educated elite, whose liberal professions have been turned into senseless money-making machines, are condemning themselves to the slavery of endless working hours — till they collapse like overloaded beasts of burden.

THE PARADOX OF PROVINCIALISM

In a homage to Henri Michaux (arguably the greatest poet in the French language this century), Borges made an interesting point: “A writer who was born in a big country is always in danger of believing that the culture of his native country encompasses all his needs. Paradoxically, he therefore runs the risk of becoming provincial.” Naturally, the poet from Buenos Aires was in a good position to detect the secret strength of the poet from Namur (Michaux loathed his birthplace — the province of a province).

In the time of Goethe, Weimar was a town somewhat smaller than Queanbeyan today. I wonder if there was not a direct relation between the universal reach of Goethe’s antennae (not only did he keep abreast of the latest developments on the English and French literary scenes, but he even displayed an enthusiastic interest in newly translated Chinese novels!) and the narrow horizon of his provincial abode. My point is not that Queanbeyan is shortly going to produce a Goethe — though this remains of course entirely possible; the emergence of genius is always arbitrary and its manifestation presents no necessity. I merely wish to underline Borges’s paradox: cosmopolitanism is more easily achieved in a provincial setting, whereas life in a metropolis can insidiously result in a form of provincialism.

People who live in Paris, London or New York have a thousand convincing reasons to feel that they are “where the action is,” and therefore they tend to become oblivious to the fact that rich developments are also taking place elsewhere. This is something which educated people who live in a village are unlikely ever to forget. (Still, needless to say, there is one thing worse than ignoring the outside world when in New York, and that is ignoring the outside world when in Queanbeyan.)

Culture is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. In this sense, “national culture” is a self-contradiction, and “multiculturalism” a pleonasm. The death of culture lies in self-centredness, self-sufficiency and isolation. (Here, for example, the first concern — it seems — should not be to create an Australian culture, but a cultured Australia.)

When modern navigators reached Easter Island, they were confronted with an enigma: What was the meaning of the colossal stone monuments that stood on top of the cliffs? Who had carved these monoliths? By what feats of sophisticated engineering were they erected? Since the local population could not offer the slightest clue to answer these questions, it was assumed that they were late-comers and that the original nation of monument-builders had vanished with their entire civilisation. Archaeological and anthropological research eventually solved the riddle: the early settlers had reached the island by accident; at first they maintained their culture and technology, but then, marooned for centuries in complete isolation, deprived of outside contacts, challenges and stimulations, their descendants progressively could no longer muster the energy to cultivate their burdensome heritage; eventually they ceased to understand it, and in the end its very memory was lost. In its lonely and perfectly sterile purity, Easter Island is the ultimate paradigm of a “national culture.”