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"A balance is nearly impossible to attain. But via the pipe smoking you can, now and then, create a transition ritual, or a time-related refuge which you can use to relax with - in the here and now."
"A breathing space away from all those points in time during which we are otherwise under the control of one thing or another. We have to manage to be there, and be there at a specific point in time, we have to be dressed in a quite specific manner, and on the overall we have to adapt ourselves to a vast number of different rules."
"Beyond that, we have the same pattern at home, where an abundance of things have to be taken care of since, even though much of the housework has gradually become automated, there are still many things in terms of obligations which need to be dealt with."
"The great chromium-plated questions remain. When is one actually in what we call 'Tahiti humour'? When do we relax to the extent that when someone asks what time it is, we answer that it doesn't matter. Or the question: When do we eat? And we answer - when we are hungry." "In brief, when do we ever have the time to be a little easy-going?"
"When you light a pipe, you create a refuge. We use lots of time hunting for the time, hunting for the appointments, for hunting for those things which must be achieved within a large, fat appointment book, which is full of those things which preferably should have been completed yesterday."
"The very word itself 'deadline'. Why so dramatic? Why do I, after having just turned 58 years of age, not have this under control?"
"I have worked with reports and planning my entire life, so I do not sit down on the last evening before a report should be turned in, when I have known all along what it was that I should have been doing for the last 14 days, do I?"
"Well, yes, I do. The problem is that only the fewest people are able to govern their own time, and it will thus require perhaps a hundred years or so before we become used to this situation."
"Look at the very fact that we go to work, stay there and go back again the day after pay-day. That discipline is far from a given."
"In Greenland, where industrialisation is still new, one sees namely that people have still not adapted themselves to that reality. And here at home, during the 1800s, there was the so-called 'Blue Monday' when the labourers did not show up for work on Mondays."
"They were off on Sundays, and were out having a few drinks. And they, quite naturally, could not get themselves to work the following day."
"We thus have at present, with the world being somewhat different, a need more than ever for a refuge from the rat race of the busy workday. And a refuge is what you get when you light your pipe."
A pipe signals independence
"A pipe is an aid is controlling our concept of time - and really our sense of time on the overall."
"I use my pipe as a refuge, but I also use it when I really need to think. When the circumstances require ingenious ideas on the table within the next three-quarters of an hour, then to the pipe it is."
"It really gets the thoughts going. So when I have to be working in top gear, when the richness of ideas needs to be as great as absolutely possible, when recycling old ideas is not an option, then there is no way around it."
"I smoke quite a lot therefore."
"Originally, I began smoking in order to appear more mature and adult-like, since smoking a pipe is in many ways one of the last bastions of masculinity."
"With a pipe in my mouth, one can, with a little bit of goodwill, certainly be granted permission to feel a bit like the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr. In step with attitudes towards smoking, it has also become at the same time a symbol of independence. A little along the lines of 'Here, I am the one who makes the decisions. I decide for myself whether I will smoke or not smoke."
"A pipe first and foremost signals independence."
"It is a sign that one is a man, who has not succumbed to the instructional pamphlets."
Rolf Jensen works with the nature of the matter, in part with concepts such as quality of life and concentration, and in June of last year he published the book "THE DREAM SOCIETY" in the US, the Netherlands, China, Japan and Denmark. The book is a scenario for the future society, "THE DREAM SOCIETY", which is expected to succeed the information society in the course of a few years. The central thesis is that we as people will in the future attribute crucial significance to originality and dreams, and that these will characterise our consumption and lifestyle patterns in the future.
During the interview, he made frequent use of his six in total identical pipes, which are all the same proprietary model with silver fasteners. However the relatively large selection is not due to his never being able to find the pipe he needs to use, but rather completely due to pipe hygiene. He has held his job at the Institute for Futures Studies since 1983, but actually "significantly longer if you include all the overtime. So let us just say that I have worked at the institute for 17 years, but have 25 years of experience."
His background contains an MA degree in political science, which he completed in 1970. He subsequently worked in a large number of different government ministries, including the ministries for foreign affairs, defence and fisheries. And five years after he had taken a position at the institute, he was given the post as its director in 1988.
"You cannot prove the future, you have to discuss it."
That is the only thing that is relevant. Drawing up scenarios, alternative pictures of possible and probable 'futures' - so the work involves both numbers and fantasy. There is just as much of the emotional as there is of the intellectual.
"You are good at making predictions, but try making predictions about the future of pipe smoking."
"I have never smoked a cigarette in my entire life, not even when I was out of pipe tobacco in a foreign country where there wasn't any to be found - I've never gone that low."
"I have once tried to take the tobacco out of a cigarette and put it in a pipe, but it really isn't much of a pleasure."
"That type of tobacco almost burns on its own."
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