It is not given to men to know the ends of their journeys. . . . It may be that you will never return to the places dearest to you. But how can that matter, if what you must do is here and now?
The Book of Three. Macmillan. 1964
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Friday, May 20, 2016
private mount everest
Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb. You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don't make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow-line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.
"Mount Everest" Gapingvoid. 7/29/2004
Thursday, May 19, 2016
work that is straightforwardly useful
The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.
Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?
High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.
When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
"The Case for Working With Your Hands," New York Times Magazine. May 24, 2009. p.36
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
they're much more real
The locomotive engineer... the farmer who is out pitting himself against the weather and against the... bugs and everything else all the time - to me they're much more real than the guy who makes the money and sits in the office... I find myself more sympathetic to them. I always have.... I suppose it's also because I can't imagine anything duller than sitting in an office all day long.
as quoted in Brave Companions: Portraits in History by David McCullough. Simon and Schuster, 1992. p. 185
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
day after solid day
When he began working in New Orleans, eleven years earlier, Zeitoun labored for just about every contractor in the city, painting, hanging Sheetrock, tiling – anything they needed – until he was hired by a man named Charlie Saucier. Charlie owned his own company, had built it from scratch. He’d become wealthy, and was hoping to retire before his knees gave out on him.
Charlie had a son in his late teens, and he wanted nothing more than to leave the company to his son. He loved his son, but his son was not a worker, he was shifty and ungrateful. He failed to show up for work, and when he did, he worked listlessly, and condescended to his father’s employees.
At the time, Zeitoun didn’t have a car, so he rode to Charlie’s work sites on a bike – a ten-speed he bought for forty dollars. One day, when Xeitoun was already in danger of being late, the bike blew a tire. After riding on the rim for half a mile, he gave up. He needed to get four miles across the city in twenty minutes, and it was looking like he would be late for work for the first time in his life. He couldn’t leave the bike and run – he needed that bike – and he couldn’t ride on the flat tire, so he threw the bike over his shoulders and started jogging. He was panicking. If he was late for this job, what would happen to his reputation? Charlie would be disappointed, and he might not hire him again. And what if Charlie talked to other contractors, and found he couldn’t recommend Zeitoun? The consequences could be far-reaching. Work was a pyramid, he knew, built on day after solid day.
He ran faster. He would be tardy, but if he sprinted, he had a shot at being no more than fifteen minutes late. It was August and the humidity was profound. A mile or so into his run, already soaked in sweat, a truck pulled up next to him.
“What are you doing?” a voice asked. Without breaking stride, Zeitoun turned to see who it was. He figured it was some smart aleck poking fun at the man running along the road with a bike over his shoulders. But instead it was his boss, Charlie Saucier.
“I’m going to the job,” Zeitoun said. He was still running; in hindsight he should have stopped at this point, but he was in a rhythm and he continued, with the truck puttering beside him.
Charlie laughed. “Throw your bike in the back.”
As they drove, Charlie looked over to Zeitoun. “You know, I’ve been at this for thirty years, and I think you’re the best worker I’ve ever had.”
They were driving to the job site and Zeitoun had finally managed to relax, knowing he wouldn’t be fired that day.
“I have one guy,” Charlie continued, “he says he can’t come to work because his car won’t start. I have another guy, he doesn’t come because he slept late. He slept late! Another guy, his wife kicked him out of the house or something. So he doesn’t show. I have twenty or thirty employees, and ten of them show up to work any given day.”
They were at a stop sign, and Charlie took a long look at Zeitoun. “Then there’s you. You have the perfect excuse. All you have is a bike, and the bike has a flat. But you’re carrying your bike on your back. You’re the only guy I’ve ever known who would have done something like that.”
Zeitoun. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 2010.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)