Chores and Work

It’s been seventeen years more or less since I read it as a high-schooler, but a few sentences by Joseph Conrad in his novel, The Heart of Darkness, have tormented me. I have checked my thoughts against his ever since. He said, and I paraphrase because I would rather convey my memory after all these years because it is the impression of his words that have lasted. It sticks with me that he said, “I don’t like to work. No man does. I like what is in the work: a chance to know myself.”

After thinking about it for many years and evolving to a place where the work is good, I think I have to disagree with a few of the sentences that were formative to my thoughts. I agree in that I have no interest anymore in being a mere manual laborer where my efforts could be traded by anyone and the homeowner would never even have to learn my name in order to have gravel moved by shovel, or a trench dug, or roofing tiles lugged up to the roof. Theses are things that Cicely and I do without hiring anyone because as Conrad said, we like what is in the work. But after thinking about it for many years, I do like the work. I like that with every shovel full of gravel the pile gets smaller and the fill hole shallower.

I have watched with everyone else as an economy built on making money has crashed, perhaps because it is not based on making and doing things, like moving gravel and making a home of 2X6’s and made instead of innovative but shady financial contraptions and an oversimplification of the human experience. America used to make things, like ideas, and food, and cities. When America began making money in trade for individuals, its stock went down.

The over-specialization has led to mere consumerism in many ways, and it is dangerous because it is inhuman, uninspiring, and when things get bad enough, a dead end economically and spiritually, with a feeble solution as the best possible outcome: a so-called rescue by a huge central government that for its pool of experts makes little but leverage between people.

I like what is in the work but I also like doing it, sweat and all. This is why I chose to mix a yard of concrete for the studio stoop with a hoe and wheelbarrow instead of having it delivered by the concrete plant less than a mile away. I like making something I am responsible for, something that may last generations. The sculpting studio is dried in and the wood-burning stove heats up our former garage enough to open the fire door to the house to let in supplemental heat even though the studio has yet to be uninsulated just as the fall is pushing hard to bring winter in. We have all winter to get the space wired, insulated, and sheet rocked. There are storage tables to build and trim to do and a new concrete floor to pour and finish but the windows are in, the siding finished, the porch perch poured.

I like the work. I like to do it even in my spare time though I’d like to have two more months of good weather to catch up on my commitments before winter. I like to pound nails by hand, to mix concrete with a mason’s hoe in a wheelbarrow, and I like to split wood with an axe. When Conrad said that no man likes work, he was too lazy with his absolute. It might have served him well to be doing the right physical work instead of merely writing a masterpiece while chores got in the way.