Featuring: William Blake, Dicky Fox in Jerry Maguire, Samuel Gompers | Ananda K. Coomaraswamy(twice), Henri Michaux(twice), John Cougar Mellencamp, Robertino Rodrigues, age 17, Victor Mansfield, Wendell Berry, John Steinbeck(twice), John Irving, John Kennedy Toole, H.G. Wells, Richard P. Feynman, Ray Bradbury, Victor Frankenstein(Mary Shelley), Hilaire Belloc, Ralph Ellison, Henry David Thoreau, Kate Chopin, William Goldman, Nietzsche, Bernhard Schlink, Bryan Magee, Robertson Davies, Henry David Thoreau(again), Bette Bao Lord, Joseph Conrad
O what an humble garb true Joy puts on! Those who want Happiness must stoop to find it; it is a flower that grows in every vale. Vain foolish man, that roams on lofty rocks! where, 'cause his garments are swoln with wind, he fancies he is grown into a giant!
William Blake
"Hey, I don't have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I have failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life, and I wish you my kind of success."
Dicky Fox in Jerry Maguire
It[labor] is producing wealth but grinding man, and, while I think we all agree that production is one of the essentials of life and that while greater productions must go on in order to satisfy our growing needs, there are other considerations of a primary and more important character, and that is that the intelligence, that the physique, that the spirit, the mind, hopes, and aspirations of man shall be also cultivated and given an opportunity for higher achievements.
Samuel Gompers, 1911
quoted in Visions of Technology by Richard Rhodes
No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things than can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
---Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there.
---Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
At every factory I spent time studying all the various sections of the operation and picked out the best workers in each. I put them in charge, promising them a share of my percentage if they helped me to increase their yield. No one turned me down. Then together we we thought of new ways to improve efficiency.[italics mine]
---Chinese Entrepreneur quoted in Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic
My Chinese side wonders why Americans are so uneasy with time on their hands and must busy themselves with activities, the sweatier the better. Why do they keep changing their minds and ways, jobs and towns and spouses; send children packing just because they're able to fend for themselves, and parents just because they're unable to? Why do they toil all year to pay for the costly privilege of diving beneath shark-infested waters or plunging down icy cliffs trussed to greasy planks?. . . Is it any wonder then that they are always asking themselves who they are? They just don't stay put or reflect long enough to find out.
----Bette Bao Lord, Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. . . . He has not time to be anything but a machine.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Again, the idea is to sacrifice hypotheses rather than human beings or valuable resources(including time). A society[or corporation] that goes about things in this way will be more successful in achieving the aims of its policy-makers[or managers] than one in which they forbid critical discussion of their policies, or forbid critical comment on the practical consequences of those policies. Suppression of criticism means that more mistakes than otherwise will go unperceived in the formulation of policy, and also that after mistaken policies have been implemented they will be persisted in for longer before being altered or abandoned.
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher
Magee, Bryan, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy, Random House, Inc., New York, 1997, pg. 189.
During my long summer vacations I worked at undemanding jobs . . . which enabled me to do a lot of reading and keep body and soul together without touching my education money, which was the way I looked on my capital.
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Davies, Robertson, Fifth Business, Penguin Books, New York, 1986, pp. 109-110.
As usual, I wondered whether he was really turning over my mother's question in his mind, or whether he was thinking about work. Maybe he did try to think about my mother's question, but once his mind started going, he could only think about work. He was a professor of philosophy and thinking was his life--thinking and reading and writing and teaching.
Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him. The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with and that curls up in your lap, purring, to be stroked--you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing-- buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box, and trips to the vet--is really too much. Your life is elsewhere. I wish that we, his family, had been his life.
Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
Schlink, Bernhard, The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 1997, pg. 30.
For work uses up an extraordinary proportion of nervous force, withdrawing it from reflection, meditation, dreams, cares, love, and easy and regular gratification. Thus it happens that a society where work is continually being performed will enjoy greater security, and it is security which is now venerated as the supreme deity.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
Nietzsche is quoted in The Oxford Book of Work, Edited by Keith Thomas, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pg. 122.
"WHY WON'T YOU?"[come work with me]
"Because my friend, Yeste, you are very famous and very rich, and so you should be, because you make wonderful weapons. But you must also make them for any fool who happens along. I am poor, and no one knows me in all the world except you and Inigo, but I do not have to suffer fools."
"You are an artist," Yeste said.
"No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very, very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer."
Goldman, William, The Princess Bride, A Del Rey Book, Ballantine Books, New York, 1992, pg. 100.
"Mercy!" exclaimed Edna, who had been fuming. "Why are you taking the thing so seriously and making such a fuss over it?"
"I'm not making a fuss over it. But it's just such seeming trifles that we've got to take seriously; such things count."
Chopin, Kate, The Awakening and Selected Stories, Penguin Books, Published by the Penguin Group, Viking Penguin, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1986. pg. 101.
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau, Henry David, "Civil Disobedience," from the web site "The Thoreau Reader: The works of Henry D. Thoreau, 1817-1862" quote is from this web page.
"Right down here is where the real paint is made. Without what I do they couldn't do nothin'. They'd be making bricks without straw . . ."
" . . . I was wondering what you did down here."
". . . Can't a single doggone drop of paint move out of the factory lessin' it comes through Lucius Brockway's hands."
"How long you been doing this?"
"Long enough to know what I'm doin'," he said. "And I learned it without all that education that them what's been sent down here is supposed to have. I learned it by doin' it. Them personnel fellows don't want to face the facts, but Liberty Paints wouldn't be worth a plug nickel if they didn't have me here to see that it got a good, strong base."
Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, read by Joe Morton, Random House Audiobooks, unabridged, Random House Audio Publishing, Inc., 1999, Tape 5, Side A
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
Hilaire Belloc
Belloc, Hilaire quoted in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1991, pg. 474.
In America we have developed the Corporation Man. His life, his family, his future--as well as his loyalty--lie with his corporation. His training, his social life, the kind of car he drives, the clothes he and his wife wear, the neighborhood he lives in, and the kind of and cost of his house and furniture, are all dictated by his corporate status. His position in the pyramid of management is exactly defined by the size of his salary and bonuses. The pressures toward conformity are subtle but inexorable, for his position and his hoped for promotion to a higher status are keyed to performance of duties, activities, and even attitudes which make the corporation successful.
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John, America and Americans, photographs edited by the staff of Studio Books, The Viking Press, Inc, New York, N.Y., 1966, pg. 86.
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. . .
Victor Frankenstein
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Penguin Books, Viking Penguin, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1985, pg. 99.
"And the second?"[thing we need, Montag asks]
"Leisure."[Faber replies]
"Oh, but we've plenty of off-hours."
"Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'"
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451, Del Rey, A Del Rey Book, Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1991, pg. 84.
Advertising, for example, is an example of a scientifically immoral description of the products. This immorality is so extensive that one gets so used to it in ordinary life you do not appreciate that it is a bad thing.
Richard P. Feynman, Co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965
Feynman, Richard P., The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, ©1999 Carl and Michelle Feynman, ©2000 Books on Tape, Inc., Published by arrangement with Melanie Jackson Agency, L.L.C., Books on Tape, Inc., Library Edition, Newport Beach, CA. Tape 3, Side 2.
"Here I am!" he repeated, "and my chance has gone from me. Three times in one year the door has been offered me--the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone---"
"How do you know?"[he asked Lionel Wallace]
"I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say, I have success--this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it." He had a walnut in his hand. "If that was my success," he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see.
H.G. Wells, "The Door in the Wall"
Wells, H.G., The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, with photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, afterword by Jeffrey A.Wolin, David R. Godine, Publisher, Boston, Mass., 1980, pg. 22.
"I am at the moment unempolyed and have been launched upon a quest for work. However, I might as well have had the Grail set as my goal. I have been rocketing about the business district for a week now. Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking."
Ignatius Reilly
Toole, John Kennedy, A Confederacy of Dunces, foreword by Walker Percy, Wings Books a division of Random House Value Publishing, Inc., New York, 1996, pg. 182.
You could sit or stand, and Melony tried both positions, alternating them through the day. The belt was too high to make sitting comfortable and too low to make standing any better. Your back hurt in one place when you stood and in another place when you sat. Not only did Melony not know who did what, where, to the other half of the sprocket; she also didn't know what the sprocket was for. What's more, she didn't care.
John Irving, The Cider House Rules
Irving, John, The Cider House Rules, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, Copyright ©1985 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd., pp. 332-333.
All in all, he had always been a fulfilled and contented man. A specimen so rare aroused yearning in other men, for how few men like their work, their lives--how very few men like themselves.
And so Doc threw himself into his work, hoping, the way a man will, to smother the unease with weariness.
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John, Sweet Thursday, Penguin Books USA Inc., New York, 1996, pp. 18-21
You're really set on climbing the ladder? And suppose you wind up hanged?
Henri Michaux
Michaux, Henri, Tent Posts, translated from the French by Lynn Hoggard, Green Integer Books, København, 1997, pg. 111.
Unlike the culture of the European Middle Ages, which honored the vocations of the learned teacher, the country parson, and the plowman as well as that of the knight, or the culture of Japan in the Edo period which ranked the farmer and the craftsman above the merchant, our own culture places an absolute premium upon various kinds of stardom. This degrades and impoverishes ordinary life, ordinary work, and ordinary experience. It depreciates and underpays the work of the primary producers of goods, and of the performers of all kinds of essential but unglamorous jobs and duties. The inevitable practical results are that most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served.
Wendell Berry
Berry, Wendell, Life is a Miracle; An Essay Against Modern Superstition, Counterpoint, Washington D.C., a member of the Perseus Books Group, 2000, pg. 57.
We need hardly say that from the traditional point of view there could hardly be found a stronger condemnation of the present social order than in the fact that the man at work is no longer doing what he likes best, but rather what he must, and in the general belief that a man can only be really happy when he 'gets away' and is at play. . . . It is this way of life that our civilization denies to the vast majority of men, and in this respect that it is notably inferior to even the most primitive or savage societies with which it can be contrasted.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1956, pg. 26.
Our hankering for a state of leisure or leisure state is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss.
We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can be only a hothouse and unreal culture where work itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make we are not cultured.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1956, pg. 15.
Life, as quickly as you use it, melts away, disappears, long only to someone who knows how to drift, loaf. On the eve of his death, the man of action and work realizes--too late--life's natural span, the one he too might have known had he only understood, through constant intervention, how not to act.
Henri Michaux
Michaux, Henri, Tent Posts, translated from the French by Lynn Hoggard, Green Integer Books, København, 1997, pg. 29.
Jackson Jackson was a good kid
he had four years of college and his bachelor's degree,
started work when he was twenty-one
got fed up and quit when he was forty-three.
He said, 'My whole life I've done what I'm supposed to do
now I'd like to maybe do something for myself.
Just as soon as I figure out what that is
you bet your life I'm gonna get . . .'[as much as I listen to this section of the song I cannot figure out the last few words]I want to live the real life
I want to live my life close to the bone
Just because I'm middle-aged
That don't mean I want sit around this house and watch t.v.
I want the real life.
I want to live the real life.
John Cougar Mellencamp
Mellencamp, John Cougar, "Real Life," from the album, The Lonesome Jubilee, manufactured and marketed by PolyGram Records, ©1987 John Mellencamp
"There's a lot of anger in the my generation. You can hear it in the music. Kids are angry for a lot of reasons, but mostly because parents aren't around."
Robertino Rodrigues, 17
Newsweek, May 8, 2000, page 55.
In the past we have been too quick to judge a culture by its technological prowess, its attainments in the material realm. If you could dazzle a culture with the might of your 'fire sticks' or rifles then they obviously had little to teach you. In that sense Tibet before the invasion of the Chinese Communists . . . has nothing to teach us, for they only employed the wheel in prayer wheels, not for transportation or machinery. However, more recetnly we have come to appreciate the richness and depth of their 'inner technology.'
Victor Mansfield
Mansfield, Victor, Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making, Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Peru, Ill., 1995, pg. 227.
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