Summer Special - John Gray follows the Etruscan example and rediscovers the art of living

Imagining how the peasants might have looked as they came back from working in the fields in Etruscan times, D H Lawrence wrote that "somebody, surely, would be playing the pipes, and somebody, surely, would be singing, because the Etruscans had a passion for music, and an inner carelessness the modern Italians have lost". He went on: "We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead." No doubt the vision of ancient peasant life that Lawrence presented in his book Etruscan Places owed much to his fervid imagination. Like many another Romantic visionary, he looked into the past as into a mirror. His view of ancient peasant life tells us more about his own anxieties than it does about how people actually lived in those far-off times.

Yet I could not help recalling Lawrence's observations when I was in Tuscany this summer. As always, I took afternoon coffee in a cafe in a small square in the shadow of the 18th-century Etruscan Academy. The square is the centre of life in the town. Not only visitors, but also those for whom the town is home, spend a good part of the day there. The inhabitants of this little town in the hills outside Florence are far from idle, but their lives have a leisurely pace. For several hours around lunchtime, the proprietor of the shop where I bought my daily newspaper sat nearby at one of the tables in the cafe, eating and drinking, and interrupting what seemed an unending conversation only when a customer turned up. I was struck by the unhurried enjoyment that he and his companions took in their food and conversation. No doubt they have known each other all their lives. Even so, the pleasure they find in daily replenishing their acquaintance is unmistakeable.

If life in a small Tuscan town has a grace and freedom that is lacking elsewhere, it is partly because it is still intensely local. To be sure, such towns are entangled inextricably in the net of the global economy. After all, their prosperity depends on tourism, and their famously pragmatic inhabitants seize on every new technology - motor scooters, mobile phones, the internet - to make their lives more convenient and comfortable. But rather than surrendering themselves to the world market, they have come to a modus vivendi with it. They have contrived to renew their old cities rather than destroy them. They have rewoven the web of family and friendship. They have come to an accommodation with the times, while remaining what they have always been.

Pondering this over my coffee, I reflected that one of the great strengths of these descendants of the ancient Etruscans is their ingrained materialism. The taste of bread, the size and shape of a garden, the strength of a wall - these tangible realities, sensuous and physical, are what is finally real. Religions and regimes, doctrines and ideals, are no more than phantoms. There can be no worse folly than to sacrifice ourselves to such chimerical things; our passions should be spent in daily life. It is this meticulous attention to everyday material things, I believe, that accounts for the grace of life in Tuscany. Equally, it is a lack of true materialism that accounts for the peculiar poverty of life in the Anglo-Saxon world - even at its most affluent.

During the Eighties, I spent most of my summers in northern California. The area around San Francisco has a variety of landscape unsurpassed anywhere in the world. In a part of the world where choice is the supreme value, nature has arranged that one can even choose the weather - utterly different climates are only a few hours' drive away. But the beauty of northern California is an unpeopled splendour. It is the beauty of wilderness. In an odd way, this is also true of San Francisco - an inexhaustibly beautiful city. In seven summers, I saw nothing in it more lovely than the cat's paws of mist that creep over Alcatraz and across the Bay at sundown.

The poverty of life in Anglo-Saxon countries stems from our increasing insistence on the pursuit of dreams. It is not the aroma of coffee or the feel of cool stone on a sultry afternoon that people prize, but the symbolic, intangible and - as they have now discovered- ephemeral wealth that comes with success in a highly volatile economy. Share options are poor compensation for a life in which no one has time for conversation, cities are little more than traffic intersections and meals are passed in a blur of business. D H Lawrence was right. We have lost the art of living, not by being too materialistic, but by failing to give a proper value to the material conditions of our lives.

John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics

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