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.”
CIGARETTES ARE SUBLIME
After a long wait, I finally obtained a copy of Richard Klein’s book in praise of smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime—but I put it on a shelf and have not opened it yet. Why? I suspect that I may unconsciously fear that this book achieves something I have vaguely dreamed of doing myself. (Whenever you have a good idea, do not put it into practice, there is no need for that — sooner or later, someone else is bound to hit upon the same concept, and will do a better job of it.)
What I had in mind actually was a sort of anthology — pictorial and literary — celebrating tobacco. For the pictures, I would have started with seventeenth-century Tabagies by the old masters from the Low Countries — Brouwer, Van Ostade, Teniers, etc. Then, for the modern times, there would have been Baudelaire with his pipe, as seen by Courbet; Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé, showing the poet wrapped in the blue smoke of his cigar; Van Gogh’s Pipe on a Chair, Cézanne and Degas’s various portraits of smokers. Even musicians could have been mobilised for my purpose: Bach, for instance, once professed in the same breath his serene faith in God and the trust he put in his pipe — the only pity is that, having already made a cantata praising coffee, he did not go one step further and compose a Tobacco Cantata.* What a magnificent anthem this would have constituted for today’s embattled smokers!
On the literary side, my anthology would have been faced with an embarrassment of riches. Balzac could have contributed many quotable passages on cigars. (For instance, there is a memorable episode in La Fille aux yeux d’or, after young de Marsay finally succeeds in winning the favours of the mysterious and elusive Girl With the Golden Eyes and spends a wild night of passion with her. As he walks out of her house in the early dawn, he lights up a cigar and, drawing a long puff, says to himself: “This at least is something no man will ever tire of!”) Yet the opening quote should naturally belong to Samuel Johnson; it is no surprise that this inexhaustible font of wisdom on all sublunary topics should have repeatedly celebrated the virtues of tobacco; for example, he attributed the admirable placidity of the Dutch to their habit of smoking (and of playing draughts). For Johnson, who was haunted by a neurotic fear of madness, tobacco appeared as a powerfully soothing influence, and Hawkins heard him say: “As smoking is going out of fashion, insanity is growing more frequent.” Today, the manic fanaticism of the anti-smoking lobby eloquently confirms the accuracy of this observation.
Actually, the current antics of the anti-tobacco activists would have provided rich material for an entire section of my anthology. Some time ago, it was reported in an English magazine that in a fairly crowded railway compartment, a couple who had been engaged in passionate kissing for some time eventually came to perform full sexual intercourse under the impassive eyes of the other passengers; it was only when, post coitum, the lovers attempted to light a cigarette that their co-travellers abandoned their reserve and reminded them indignantly that it was most improper to smoke in a public place.