I continue to delight in the unending popularity of Latin! Catching up this Monday morning on yesterday’s Sunday newspaper (abandoned on Sunday in favor of writing letters, napping, and enjoying the mild late-winter weather), I find mention of a restaurant in Los Angeles called Otium. To one who knows Latin and has studied the literature of the first century B.C., the era of Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, and Horace, otium is the prize worth working for! Romans of this era considered otium the time to live free from cares and stress, the time to pursue activities that give pleasure, the time to visit a country estate and enjoy good food, good wine, the company of good friends, perhaps the performing of poems in the works. Otium was the elusive goal we sometimes call the good life.
For Romans the opposite of otium was neg-otium or not-leisure. I, an American, have always found this outlook on the world wondrous. From the time I was small, I was aware that work was important and integral to survival, taking responsibility, and making one’s way through life. I began my working career with babysitting on a small scale in the neighborhood. I graduated to waitressing in a family chain restaurant and then in an independent Greek pizza restaurant; proofreading and odd jobs in print shops; more waitressing this time in a pub, telephone sales, and having finished college, working as a teacher in independent schools. Even then, during summer vacations, I sometimes tried other jobs like groundskeeping at the school and occasionally tutoring.
Reading literature in college and graduate school, I finally understood the correct relationship between negotium (work) and otium (leisure). I learned to value school vacations, because they were a much-needed break from the intense intellectual tasks of learning and teaching. I understood the difference between leisure activities (playing with dogs, cleaning the house, weeding the garden, reading books, entertaining friends with home-cooked dinners, writing letters, essays, poems, visiting with and listening to others) and work (preparing classes, assignments, projects, evaluations, translations). Although I loved to immerse myself in the details and nuances of Latin vocabulary, grammar, and literature, in the pursuit of work I missed a lot of otium, of opportunities to spend time with family and friends and my own ideas and projects. But the poet Catullus, who died when he was about thirty years old, when Vergil was a college student and Horace a schoolboy, indicated how otium, for a young man, could lead to great destruction:
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est: [Leisure, Catullus, is troublesome for you:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis: in leisure you rejoice exceedingly and run riot:
otium et reges prius et beatas leisure before has destroyed both kings and
perdidit urbes. blessed cities.]
(from poem 51)
