Alain :
« Le travail est la meilleure et la pire des choses ; la meilleure, s’il est libre, la pire, s’il est serf. J’appelle libre au premier degré le travail réglé par le travailleur lui-même, d’après son savoir propre et selon l’expérience, comme d’un menuisier qui fait une porte. Mais il y a de la différence si la porte qu’il fait est pour son propre usage, car c’est alors une expérience qui a de l’avenir ; il pourra voir le bois à l’épreuve, et son œil se réjouira d’une fente qu’il avait prévue. Il ne faut point oublier cette fonction d’intelligence, qui fait des passions si elle ne fait des portes. »
[Work is the best and the worst of things; the best if it’s free, the worst if it’s suffered. I call free in the first degree the work regulated by the worker himself, after his own knowledge and according to experience, like that of a carpenter who makes a door. But there is a difference if the door he makes is for his own use, because it is then an experience that has a future; he will be able to see the wood put to the test, and his eye will rejoice at a split that he predicted. This function of the intelligence can’t be forgotten, which makes passions if it doesn’t make doors.]
*
My eye landed on this propos of Alain’s this morning, as I was sitting down for breakfast. That last line struck me the most and I tried to memorize it before making my breakfast.
I think of this a lot these days. How susceptible I am! And how frequently, how regularly I suffer from my imagination (or my untethered intelligence) day after day after day! I sit down at work and, what I have to do not occupying my mind at all, the work being mechanical and mindless, my mind flies and creates a thousand thousand problems out of thin air, the nightmares becoming reality and I sitting there quite still in my chair…
I’m so used to this, it’s so everyday, so bound up in my experience of life, —it’s fair I think to say that it’s the source of most of my problems today—, that it’s a little bit embarrassing to say it at all. I’m not alone I know.
‘We all live in our dream’, as someone’s said somewhere, or Shakespeare’s (isn’t it?) ‘we are the stuff of dreams’. [I looked it up: ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on’, Prospero in The Tempest.] This is obviously true.
There are many of us who believe in the news, (of course among every individual there being infinite degrees of variety in these beliefs, in intensity, in depth, in direction and variability), there are many of us who believe in sports or music or streaming shows (every individual with an absolutely unique and personal fandom, subject to change with every mood and every hour); no one believes in anything the same way; and, as it’s good to remember, we change all the time, all of us in our feeling for everything (for ourselves and for our work, for where we are and the world around us, the people and the ideas we pass our days with, etc. etc.) caught up in between ‘the being born and the passing away’ (as I recently read somewhere in French, in a book on Montaigne; ask me about it if you’re curious).
I love that phrase (I don’t have the French text near me): ‘the being born and the passing away’; we can think here simply of mood, of the objects of our attention and desire (and our feeling for them), what we feel bound to thinking about or getting done; it isn’t the same in the afternoon as it was in the morning, or at 6pm at as it was 5pm; it’s flux, or constant change, and nothing more (and for all of us the same, to the very end).
Gray Haskins 