The Case for Working with your Hands

From today's NY Times:

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this. Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

If actions have the power to form habits, if repeated actions form our selves, then what type of people is our modern workforce making? Fight Club, The Office, Dilbert, Wanted--all have commented on the soul crushing nature of the cubicle. Yet not everyone can become motorcycle repairmen and not everyone is willing to start a small family farm. How then is integrity and dignity returned to work?

Remember Remember

This is an interesting passage from Alan Bennett's History Boys about the purpose of memorial day. I am not sure of the degree to which I agree with Irwin, but Irwin would appreciate his lesson taken as a thought exercise and not the truth.

Scripps: But it’s all true.

Irwin: What has that got to do with it? What has that got to do with anything? Let’s go back to 1914 and I’ll put you a different case. Try this for size. Germany does not want war and if there is an arms race it is Britain who is leading it. Though there’s no reason why we should want war. Nothing in it for us. Better stand back and let Germany and Russia fight it out while we take the imperial pickings. These are facts. Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantelpiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise that so far as the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something that by commemorating it.

I fear the Trojans

"You should not look a gift universe in the mouth." G. K. Chesterton 

The Classics

The Guardian ran an article entitled "The Curse of the Classics" in which the author claims that "Today, someone's taste for the "classics" can cover up no discernible individual or original taste of their own. Classic trumpeting can be a refuge for philistinism or nationalistic indolence. Unlike the word masterpiece, the classic category only pretends to be an aesthetic valuation." Doubtless this view has some merit, I know people who have added books along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Dubliners, or The Illiad under the favorite books under their facebook page not cause they liked the book (or in some cases had even read the book) but because it made them seem smart or sophisticated or well read.

Yet these books do not have that standing merely because they are assigned in English classes. There has to be something to these books that inspires generation after generation to pick up The Brothers Karamazov, authors to play with the stories from the Edda, yet another Hollywood block buster to be loosely based off a Shakespeare play. People don't put that much stock in critics opinions. These works are still popular because they speak to the human experience--because their prose moves us and their ideas inspire us.

I am currently reading Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There is little in the book to act as a corollary to my life, in fact the remote setting and fantastic elements would make it difficult for many modern readers to relate to. Except that Hugo cuts to the quick of the character making their passions, thoughts and behavior intelligible and the themes universal. Two hundred or so years after it was written Hugo's book still says more about what it means to be human than anything on prime time television, and it does so in soaring language. May classics are classics for that reason--since they are timeless treatises on humanity which challenge our world views and touches our souls. Perhaps that is why someones list of favorite books might be peppered with classics rather than a lack of "discernible individual or original taste."

A life well lived

"'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'You're claiming the right to be unhappy.'
'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'
'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

There was a long silence.'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last."- Brave New World

Out of the Mouths of Children

"Jesus wept." This act is usually overshadowed by Jesus's following action--raising Lazarus from the dead.

One of my ccd kids asked me if Jesus was perfect. When I answered yes the kids, kids who cannot remember from one week to the next what a lector is or what the three sacraments of initiation are, brought up several really good Biblical examples that they thought proved He wasn't. Examples from Bible stories we had not covered! Some, like when the child Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem instead of returning home with Mary and Joseph, were concerned with the nature of Jesus and his mission. Interestingly though, most of their examples had to do with Jesus showing emotion--he cried when Lazarus died, the got mad at the money changers in the temple, he got tired and slept through storms. These are things that are part of being human--being connected to and interacting with others invokes emotion which, in itself is not an imperfection.

Jesus wept. He felt sadness over the death of a friend, a fact which John felt was important enough record in the Gospel. This is in stark contrast to modern society which views tears, especially in men, as a sign of weakness. People with a stiff upper lip or stoic demeanor are extolled as paradigms of self control and composure. Yet Jesus, the perfect Son of God and Second Person of the Trinity, wept.

Look Harder

‘Beauty will save the world.’ --Dostoyevsky

A life well lived

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well. --Martin Luther King

Open your eyes Nicholas

Is life simply one question after another? Does my last sentence amuse me? Why? In God's name, why? Why are you doing this? But have you named them yet? You presume to demote me? Is Viscount Torville dead? My freedom? I beg your pardon? Can I never escape Him? May I ask who you are, Sir? You mock me? What should we drink to? Are you coming peacefully or do you intend to resist? You got a name, boy? Where have you been? But now we'll never know - will we? What noble business brings you here? The mighty who? Why don't you meet me outside the city by the ruins, let's say noon? What is this? Under whose authority? What did you say? Have you any idea what you've done? What kind of demonstration? You in a hurry to die? You have seen their vanishing kind? What in hellfire...? Hang himself? You came to restrain me? Why don't we charge them? Is that just because you are holier than everybody else? What gives you the right to judge me, to play God with the lives of others? You would fight me? What possible difference can I make? Are you in danger of becoming a good man? Do you remember what it was to have trust? That I should become Judas? Are you ready for a war? And you wish to charge off and fight as he did, eh? Why do you help me? Is your father a ghost, or do you converse with the Almighty? And the common man, who bleeds on the battlefield, does he risk less? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die? What lies beyond And what lay before? Is anything certain in life?


I may never find all the answers; I may never understand why. I may never prove what I know to be true, but I know that I still have to try.