London, GB | Formerly of New York, Buenos Aires, Fife, and the Western Cape. | Saoránach d’Éirinn.

Leisure

I AM BACK HOME in New York after having completed my Martinmas term examinations. This morning, my mother, sister, brother-in-law, and I went out for breakfast to celebrate my “triumphant return from another term at university.” (I suggested it might be wiser to wait until the casualty reports are released before we declare it a triumph).

Nonetheless, I now have three weeks of time almost entirely free from obligations to do whatever I please. It is perhaps how a man spends his free time that defines him, as free time is the foundation of civilization itself. Roger Kimball reflects on this in a recent Armavirumque posting, mentioning Josef Pieper and Leisure: The Basis of Culture, a book I was first introduced to by Robert O’Brien whilst still half-asleep at 7:30 in the morning waiting for a train at Leuchars station so we could attend the Tridentine mass in Edinburgh.

Leisure, by which we mean doing something merely for its own sake, is entirely different from mere pleasure. Unfortunately for the English language, we oft mistake the two for synonyms. It is leisure in that latter sense, of idleness and cheap pleasure, which our good friend Prof. Richard Demarco resoundly condemned in a lecture he gave at St Andrews. This kind of leisure, he stated, was leading to the destruction of Scotland, of Europe, and of civilization. Art today, according to Richard, is a collection of usually talentless kitsch which seeks merely to create an arrangement that is pleasing or clever. Art, in Richard Demarco’s world, should not aim to be pleasing, or to be clever, but should have as its essence the very highest that man can achieve: the sanctification of souls. In pursuit of pleasure rather than leisure, tourism is taking over entire countries; a false economy which can enslave the entire population of a given area.

It is certainly rampant in St Andrews. There are many good reasons to visit St Andrews. The third-oldest university in the English-speaking world, for example, or perhaps to see ruins of one of the greatest shrines in Christendom, bearing witness to the visceral damage wrought by the Protestant Revolution (we should refuse to dignify that revulsion with the name of ‘reformation’; it destroyed and replaced, not reformed). Most, however, come for the golf.

While niches once full remain empty from the holocausts of five centuries ago, the Scottish Parliament would prefer to spend its millions (which, you must never forget, are the people’s millions) on encouraging this pointless and ineffective idleness, Demarco pointed out. More recently, South Street, where I live, will soon be shorn of its beautiful trees, those which make it one of the most inviting and comely thoroughfares in the Royal Burgh. This must be done, we are told, to increase the number of parking spaces, the paucity of which might be driving away potential tourists. Perish the thought! Heaven forbid a town be run for the benefit of its inhabitants, for the benefit of itself (but surely by now they have already forbidden Heaven).

As Mr. Kimball points out, the opposite of the former leisure, the leisure which Pieper posits is the basis of culture, is busyness. Perhaps we can extend this to business, for it is the dollar, the pound, and the euro which enslave St Andrews to transient tourists. Without tourism, some say, St Andrews, or Oxford or Venice or wherever, would not survive. But at what price survival? And who defines this survival? That these places are still on the map and are inhabited is for sure. But in some sense have not these places, while encouraging tourism as a mode of survival, been so changed and transformed that in fact they have not survived. Decrepit and rundown, they may have been, but at least they had authenticity; at least they were themselves. Now most of the goods sold in St Andrews – saltires, fake kilts, tam o’shanters, and Scotland t-shirts – are in fact things that can be purchased in half the towns in Scotland, and now with the advent of the internet, you can purchase them while you remain at home. Their cheapness is only accompanied by the sentiment of being a souvenir in the original French sense of the word: to remember. But they are remembrances for short memories, and likely will be thrown out within a year, because we, and it all comes back to this, do not have the time for longer memories.

Thus one of the chief values of an education must be free time. St Andrews affords this, I am glad to say; especially if you are an arts student and are not aiming for a first. All too often friends of mine at universities in the States or at Oxbridge are busy. They are either busy with busywork, (assignments for school which must be done to stay in the university but have little graded value or academic merit) or else busy with social activity and other amusements which vary greatly as to whether one’s in a big city or not (most often the case with NYU students I find).

When I finally start my university, we must make sure that students have enough free time then, perhaps the greatest argument for not locating it in an overactive urban metropolis. Though of course a good part of education is that which transmits information and ideas and, more importantly, inculcates moral values, much must be left up to the student. There is an inherent value in reading not what is required but what is desired.

And so I will get on with my post-exam break, reading the Pickwick Papers, the Everlasting Man, and This Side of Paradise, hopefully with some time to browse through Haldane’s Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and philosophical (which, on a typographical note, makes ample use of the Gill Sans font).

Published at 12:29 pm on Monday 17 January 2005. Categories: Arts & Culture St Andrews Tags: .
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