Last year, I found myself seated beside Guido de Marco at a commemorative celebration. One of the guests of honour was stuck in traffic and so the event was late – very late – to start.
As audience understanding for the organisers’ predicament began to give way to restlessness, Prof. de Marco quietly remarked: “Il-ħin, ħin” (an appointment is an appointment). The man seated in front of him, a former colleague, swivelled his head round 180 degrees. “You! Of all people,” he hissed, with good humoured outrage. With a poker face and a shrug, Prof. de Marco replied he had merely enunciated an incontrovertible principle; he had made no claims for himself.
Prof. de Marco could wink with his voice. And with the ensuing amusement that followed his remark, not to mention the memories and anecdotes, he managed to make the dead time come to life and, for me at least, it passed so much more quickly.
Over the past week of accolades, it has been taken for granted that time management was not, shall we say, his strong suit. Of course it was not – if by “time” we mean clock time and punctuality. But I have been struck by how witness after witness has come forward to vouch – if only by implication – for the importance he gave to other kinds of time and his relative mastery over them.
His fundamental attitudes and maxims all had to do with time. His encouraging “The wheel will turn” has to do cyclical time. His emphasis on perseverance, and his motto “Keep smiling”, with crisis: the critical time of fundamental choices.
The virtue of consistency has to do with life-time: one’s life as a long-term project linking past and future. And the politics of persuasion has to do not just with giving one’s adversary space but also time: a time of exchange and reciprocity.
Nor were these simply abstractions for him. Prof. de Marco may have been careless with clock time but we have ample testimony to how he invested other kinds of time.
In counselling students and junior colleagues on how to define their own life-project and master their profession, he was managing the transmission of the past and experience of two professions – law and politics – whose consequences may be long lasting but whose artful live performances (as he was well aware) are ephemeral.
In helping shape, reform or found institutions that would outlive him, he was steering the present towards the future.
In channelling his considerable sociable and inquisitive energy into his vast network of clients, friends and acquaintances, he was attempting to manage that difficult calculus of keeping the social balance right: of the accumulation of obligations owed and won over time, of showering affection without affectation, of being a solicitous patron without being patronising, of letting himself be known a man of his word but not in so many words.
On the evidence of the last week’s tributes, he most often got it right. I doubt he would have been able to do so without his grasp of other people’s life-stories – of how their time of life chimed with his. It was not simply an intuitive grasp. He worked hard at keeping in touch.
Describing all this as time management may seem odd in the light of the idea that time is money. But he was indeed spending his time in a manner carefully managed to fulfil his idea of mission. And in his ability to illuminate for vast numbers of his compatriots the drama of the critical moment, he was able to become himself part of the time of their lives.
Having said all that, it is important not to exaggerate his command over the time of life, of institutions and, especially, of crisis. He needed his political peers as much as they needed him, while chance and luck played their own part.
For if he continued to be a role-model for young lawyers, this had to do not only with his expertise and charisma, but also with the nature of the law profession, one of the few remaining trades in which watchful apprenticeship is still relevant. In many other careers, the value of experience has been eroded by ceaseless innovation.
And if it is possible to speak of Guido de Marco’s Valletta and Ħamrun, this is because of the clear continuities between the haunts of his youth and of his old age: the respective cores of both his towns have survived well. A President from another town – say, Marsascala (to pick a not entirely random example) – whose old core has long since disappeared, may be nearly impossible to remember (in terms of space). How to link him up to places (“he used to sit there”) that have disappeared?
To point such factors out is to begin to indicate the break between Prof. de Marco’s time and that of increasingly more and more of us.
ranierfsadni@europe.com