Akenfield

Wendel Berry, on tobacco cutting...

'There is incessant speculation about the weather. There is much laughter; because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished.And there are memories. ..The crew to which I belong is the product of friendship and kinship going far back. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The tobacco cutting is a sort of ritual of remembrance....The conversation, one feels, is ancient.

One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simple all, and is enough.'

Half way through Blythe's wonderful Akenfield. Has got me thinking about work. Much more of our work seems to take place indoors and alone with computers. That means that more often than not we're isolated from other people. It also usually means that a larger part of our work is of the eye/mind and has little feel of the world through our hands. 

Also, what kind of narrative forms around the work we do? It's not that increasingly a lot of it seems meaningless (Graeber: Bullshit Jobs!) but that there's no story accompanying it (in the final analysis these two may be the same thing). Today you work on something; tomorrow it's something else. Nothing accumulates and nothing endures. Another aspect to that lack of continuity is that we never grow into or inherit a profession (which is another way of saying that there isn't really a 'way of life' any more). Instead, isolated moments of consumption..a "constantly moving happiness machine".  

So: time and place. everyone's on the move (or act as if they are) And no-one has any time for anyone else or even for themselves! Nothing can be allowed to grow slowly. Is that why so many of us -men, especially, are so immature? 

The mad rush to get there. But then you realize, there is no there there. There, there. 

Scheffler writes that the loss of a sense of temporal continuity results in us being less interested in long-term projects. Why bother if the world is nothing but a shape-shifting agglomeration of half-formed images and styles of thinking that are redundant before you can say Jack Robinson? What stands today is pulled down tomorrow. In fact, must be pulled down. And that, perhaps, is all that modern freedom consists in: the ability to negate. 

~~~

‘The old look inward at things we cannot see’.

‘The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with the names of saints..as well as rhymes and prayers engraved on their sides.’

'Because the ringers put their whole personality into their efforts ‘ they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them’.

A wheelwright says of his work, ‘It was as much in the hand as in the eye. There was a moment when you had to say now ! Then you could breathe again.’

‘ He likes to leave everything just as it was'.

[Throughout the book there is this sense of inheriting and getting into the old ways..an idea of perfection that comes with time].

‘None of us are looking for wonderful changes’..’ If I get out of my routine I’m finished’.

‘The holy time was the harvest’.