From the Editor—Local Culture 7.2: Work and Leisure

Below is the introductory essay to the new issue of Local Culture. If you subscribe in the next few days, you’ll receive this issue in your mailbox. You can whet your appetite by perusing the complete table of contents.

In preparing to pass along to my younger son a Subaru with 270,000 miles but no bumper stickers on it, I discovered I had some work to do to make the car at least partially reliable. This Outback, aged 17 years, was passing oil as if oil were wind and the engine a flatulent old man. If you’re clogging up your catalytic converters every 30 or 40 thousand miles, you’ve got issues—plus a really slow car. And there were several other oil leaks as well. I found two relatively inexpensive catalytic converters, front and back. I put the car on jack stands, took an advance on my remaining fund of swear words, crawled under the car, and went to work.

If I had a dime for every time someone has said to me, “you don’t have to do that; get someone else to do that,” I could afford a car with only 100,000 miles on it. But back of what I want to say here is not that I don’t want a car that new, which I don’t, but that sometimes a man at work is also a man at play. Suppose I am in a hospitable place, like my barn. Suppose the Detroit Tigers are on the barn radio. Suppose the barn fridge is amply supplied with a right proper assortment of Michigan beers. Suppose all that. Why, I ask you, would I not indulge myself in such delights as auto repair?

About month into his junior year of college my son reported to me that the Subaru was overheating. Of course it was. Oil leaks can corrupt the cooling system, not to mention the timing belt.

Picture me, then, professor of English and a senior member of the faculty. I am in a dorm parking lot. The Subaru is once again on jack stands. The bed of my 20-year-old pickup truck (280,000 miles) is full of tools. It is a Wednesday afternoon. An undergraduate whom both my son and I know walks by and asks me if I need help. I thank him for his kindness but, doubting his capacity to help, assure him that this is a one-man job. Plus I am a man at play and I don’t want my play disturbed.

By the next day the new radiator has arrived. I had left the car on jack stands overnight, because why wouldn’t I invite inquiries from campus security? My son and I install the new radiator and successfully burp the cooling system. Who knows but that this car will last another month?

(And as for this particular Subaru, I bought it for three reasons: one is that it was a five-speed manual. Another is that, though old, it was really clean. The previous owner, a climate activist in Birkenstocks, only drove it to the recycling center on Sundays. The third reason was to see what all the fuss about “Subies” is. But it turns out that if you’re not going to embark upon the moral improvement of the person behind you at the stoplight who’s contemplating your COEXIST sticker, there’s nothing much to fuss about except maybe the blown head gasket that’s as much a part of your future as death itself.)

A colleague who found this story amusing parted with an opinion about car repair: “that’s what money is for,” he assured me. He is wrong. He has not discovered that work is play, especially that manual work is play.

You will sometimes work harder to seduce a live brown trout to the surface than you will labor to drop a dead red pine to the ground. But both, though work, are much more than work. Wading in a river and lumberjacking in the woods are at once work and play, play and work, and in this they resemble anything we might do for instrumental ends and yet, at the same time, take a great deal of pleasure in. I might fish for my supper and split wood to cook it over and in both cases admit of ends extrinsic to the arts I’m practicing. But I might also enjoy casting a line or swinging an axe. I might enjoy hooking a speckled fish with one quick tug, just as I might enjoy opening a piece of fragrant cherry with one fell swoop. It is possible—and I would argue necessary—to take pleasure in your work, just as it is possible to work hard at what you take pleasure in, like carrying your own golf clubs for 18 holes. It is even possible to think of both fishing and felling as acts of a man at his leisure, if by leisure you mean “a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude” that “is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping [yourself] in the whole of creation.”

That last bit is the language of Joseph Pieper in Leisure the Basis of Culture, which is one of those books you don’t have to agree with completely to profit by. If you would judge a book by its title you might be tempted to dismiss Leisure with a wave and a quip. Isn’t work, which is the basis of leisure, also therefore the basis of culture? If Beethoven has starved to death, or if he has come to grief from exposure to the elements (or to the fumes of his own gastro-intestinal problems), he won’t be writing The Eroica.

Pieper did in fact address this very point in the companion essay to Leisure, an essay titled “The Philosophical Act”: “that world”—the ordinary everyday world of work, he wrote—“is of course essentially part of man’s world, being the very ground of his physical existence—without which obviously, no one could philosophize!” “Not a word need be wasted on the subject,” Pieper said. But he maintained nonetheless that the ordinary everyday world is not the ground of the thing he called “culture.” Leisure is that ground—leisure, which

is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality; only the silent hear[,] and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context does not mean “dumbness” or “noiselessness”; it is more nearly that the soul’s power to “answer” to the reality of the world is left undisturbed—

as when the soul is in the woods or on the river or under an old Subaru.

It was therefore no part of Pieper’s project to make light of our quotidian business. “Nothing, in fact, is further from my intention,” he said, “than in any way whatsoever to denigrate this world [of work] as though from some supposedly superior ‘philosophical’ standpoint.” He meant rather to emphasize what he took to be the principal features of leisure: being silent, open, receptive, poised for apprehension.

Early in the course of these two essays Pieper made an interesting remark that I’m pretty sure he understood better in theory than in practice. But it arose from a conviction he took from St. Thomas Aquinas—who also, I suspect, understood it better in theory than in practice (for I’d wager that neither of them would have known what to do with a fly rod, axe, or torque wrench): that man is capax universi, a creature capable of grasping everything, the whole, and this is why for both Aquinas and Pieper education should address the whole man. “Who nowadays,” Pieper asked, “stops to think that ‘servile work’ and ‘liberal arts’ are twin expressions, and form, one might almost say, the articulation of a joint, so that the one is hardly intelligible without the other?” “Articulation” here means “connection,” such as the kind you get from a hinge. You will recall that in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend Mr. Venus is an “articulator” of bones, and the woman Mr. Venus loves, although she knows the meager profits of his business, does not, alas, appreciate its high “art.” And he is right to note and object to this. Those who are not craftsmen do not sufficiently appreciate the exalted work of such humble craftsmen as Mr. Venus the articulator.

And that brings me, not surprisingly, to Wendell Berry.

Over and against the foregoing is the more insistent view of Berry, who speaks not for philosophy and philosophers, as Pieper did, but for farming and for farmers. In the title-track piece from The Art of Loading Brush Andy Catlett has a hired hand, a boy named Austin, who is a music major. He doesn’t know how to do anything with a mess except make it into a bigger mess (in this case loading brush). Andy tells him to go back to his college professors with the following message:

maybe it’s possible to blow things up and burn things up and tear things down and throw things away and make music all at the same time. Some, it looks like, think you can. But: if you don’t have people, a lot of people, whose hands can make order of whatever they pick up, you’re going to be shit out of luck. And in my opinion, if the art of loading brush dies out, the art of making music finally will die out too. You tell your professors, when you go back, that you met an old provincial man, a leftover, who told you: No high culture without low culture, and when low culture is the scarcest it is the highest. Tell ’em that. And then tell me what they say.

Or, maybe, tell it to Pieper. This is no mere concession to the banausic arts. Here they get their full due.

But even this is only part of what I wish to emphasize about that half of the hinge, the servile half, that the articulator of the arts joins to the liberal- or fine-arts half. Loading brush is not toil. It is work, but it is necessary work, work that comes with the injunction—in advance of the original mischief—to dress and keep: in fine, work that is a token in pledge of our dignity. Loading brush, as anyone who has done it can tell you, is work to take pleasure in, especially if the work is done artfully.

Now about seven dead pines await me in my front pasture at home, and on one of these Saturdays in the chilly winter air under a slanting post-solstitial sun I will drop one or two of these trees. I will saw up the trunks and stack the wood, either by the road for neighbors to help themselves to or near one of my several fire pits. After the heavy work I will warm myself by the fire that I will burn the branches in. I will also warm myself by the work of cleaning up all the piney shrapnel and tossing it into the fire. And when I am done there will be no signs whatsoever that a kill ever took place. (To reiterate: “if you don’t have people, a lot of people, whose hands can make order of whatever they pick up, you’re going to be shit out of luck.”) The day will not have been noiseless. On the truck radio I might have listened to Michigan State lose to any one of the 18 teams in the Big 10, but remember what Pieper said about leisure and silence. The silence is not dumbness or noiselessness but a readiness to apprehend this world in its fullness. And my work, which is also play but assuredly not toil, will have been an attempt to cultivate a contemplative attitude and steep myself in what is, in the order of things not fragmented but whole, to fulfill my vocation as a creature capax universi. Almost certainly I will have done some writing in my head while marveling at the peculiarities of the trees. Almost certainly I will have recited immortal verse to myself—and also composed several dirty limericks.

Or, to go back to an earlier point, this will have been work that is play, and work and play that are also leisure.

And no real fly fisherman fighting the current and trying to drop a stonefly above a rising trout will tell you anything different: fishing of that sort is work, but it is especially a readiness, an attitude of receptivity to being itself, an attempt to apprehend it.

Labor-saving devices are, ultimately, an affront to the dignity and necessity of work that has always been ours. And if work is also play, if it is also art, then as with all play and as with all art we will find pleasure in it, increasingly so, I believe, if that work appeals to the whole person. The disembodied person, the person who sets the body and the work of the body at a discount, cuts himself off from both dignity and its attendant pleasures. Or, to put an even finer point on it, the disembodied person is no person at all but a distortion. He is little more than the dream traveler for the pickpocketing highwaymen of technological innovation. He has been asked to replace himself, and, fool that he is, he has willingly agreed to do so. As Berry said long ago in one of his best and most prescient essays (“Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”), “The danger most immediately to be feared in ‘technological progress’ is the degradation and obsolescence of the body.” For a long time people have looked on both the body and the natural world as encumbrances and have longed to be free of both. Why not reduce the mind “to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines”? And as for the body, it “has limits that the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.” It seemed a nutty thing to say in 1989 that “the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex, which will be a great deal more abundant as soon as it can be done by machines.” But how fearful is it that in just 36 short years that chicken has come home to roost? I read recently about a sex therapist who is helping a woman deal with what has turned out to be a disappointing AI boyfriend. Since all love is mere neural activity and nothing more, so claims this demoniac therapist, what does it matter if the object of love doesn’t actually exist—or is a body reduced to a machine? You will recall that Berry added this:

I know that there are some people, perhaps many, to whom you cannot appeal on behalf of the body. To them, disembodiment is a goal, and they long for the realm of pure mind—or pure machine; the difference is negligible. Their departure from their bodies, obviously, is much to be desired, but the rest of us had better be warned: they are going to cause a lot of dangerous commotion on their way out.

This, precisely, is the world we’re living in now.

Way back in the agrarian tradition that Berry is heir to John Crowe Ransom, defending what he called the best and most sensitive of vocations, said it is a modest demand that labor partake of happiness. He wasn’t exactly saying, as I am, that work is play, and play work, but he did warn that we cannot “enlarge our consuming-time indefinitely.” The “penalty” will be “satiety and aimlessness.” Worse yet, in my view, is that we will be attacked even more than we are already by boredom, sloth, and acedia. What warfare we must wage against this rabid spiritual three-headed Cerberus almost no one knows. Nor, apparently, does anyone care. For we are assured by the maniacal technocrats suffering from acedia that AI, like the smartphone or the atomic bomb, is “just a tool.”

AI is the most insidious manifestation we have yet seen of the affront to work—work as opposed to toil—and therefore an affront to play and to art and to pleasure. It is a middle finger to the imago dei. It is Gnosticism, that deathless heresy returning in a hockey mask, knife in hand, like an immortal villain in a horror flick, except of course this protean monster will never show itself thus. It will take whatever guise suits it. It will be General Patton standing in the hatch of a tank’s turret; it will appear before us meekly, as if riding on the foal of an ass. And this manifest evil will deprive us not only of our dignity but also of the pleasure permitted us in our work. I hope—though I doubt it—that we are both good enough and smart enough to begin the long, arduous process of returning to work—not to the curse of work, not to the world of total work that Pieper warned us about, but to the dignity of work as conferred on us in that original state that it is our vocation by repentance and obedience to return to.

I realize that I have spoken uncritically of machines—of Subarus and chainsaws in particular—but I have done so only as one, like everyone else, who became conscious of the world only after being habituated to it. That is and always has been our default condition. While we are stuck in this interesting human dilemma of learning where to draw lines and, once drawn, how not to cross them, I maintain that there is joy and pleasure to be had if only we will reconcile ourselves to our condition and, like men at play, disport ourselves in the work our condition demands of us.