Autumn XVI. Physical work

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous:Autumn XV. Blackberries

I stood to-day watching the harvesters at work, and a foolish envy took hold upon me. To be one of those brawny, brown-necked men, who can string their muscles from dawn to sundown, and go home without an ache to the sound slumber which will make them fresh again for to-morrow's toil! I am a man in the middle years, with limbs shaped as those of another, and subject to no prostrating malady, yet I doubt whether I could endure the lightest part of this field labour even for half an hour. Is that indeed to be a man? Could I feel surprised if one of these stalwart fellows turned upon me a look of good-natured contempt? Yet he would never dream that I envied him; he would think it as probable, no doubt, that I should compare myself unfavourably with one of the farm horses.

Can't help thinking of Levin in Anna Karenina when I read these sentences. Tolstoy makes the point much better since he praises not just the ability to perform the work but the mental state this kind of strenuous physical labor produces in the laborer. The satisfaction and pleasure of completing a long and strenuous task is indeed a fine thing. There are probably endorphins involved, but largely it's the feeling of being pleasantly tired and the break from your normal mental concerns. It is a kind of mental holiday.

That I can still out-work people little more than a third my age is a sinful (pride) pleasure of mine. The final (back of the house) sorting day at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival this year, as last year, saw me sorting primarily recycling (and mostly glass bottles) into trash cans from a giant pile of bags that were falling apart; hoisting the cans (more than half of which I managed to over fill despite my best intentions) onto my right shoulder; and walking them over to the most convenient giant dumpster where I emptied the can over the top with a thunderous (but strangely satisfying) roar. I did this over and over again for eight hours. This made a very satisfying dent in the pile. The next day the top of my shoulder felt bruised, but I was otherwise intact. I wasn't exactly looking forward to this ordeal. And I can't say that I got the satisfaction from the work that Levin received from his threshing. But I'm happy to have done it, and I will be very sad when I'm no longer capable of such purely physical labor.

There is another point of interest in this paragraph: it shows us a form of agriculture we would have a very hard time finding in a Developed country today. Today the "stalwart fellows" would be riding tractors, quite possibly in air conditioned cabs. Though I'm thinking of Tolstoy's threshers, if the "harvesters" (a very vague term) were harvesting fruit or ground crops we are looking at boring or back-breaking stoop labor that I doubt anyone would envy. In any case, horses were undoubtedly the prime-movers in the fields he was strolling past, and that you would have to go out of your way to see today.

There comes the old idle dream: balance of mind and body, perfect physical health combined with the fullness of intellectual vigour. Why should I not be there in the harvest field, if so it pleased me, yet none the less live for thought? Many a theorist holds the thing possible, and looks to its coming in a better time. If so, two changes must needs come before it; there will no longer exist a profession of literature, and all but the whole of every library will be destroyed, leaving only the few books which are universally recognized as national treasures. Thus, and thus only, can mental and physical equilibrium ever be brought about.

I have no idea what he means here. I suppose that there would not be time for both a physical and intellectual life, so that one or both would have to be curtailed. This morning I was in the gym (keeping myself in shape for those days of draining physical effort) and I am pleasantly tired and relaxed and refreshed for my reading and writing. Six or so hour of exercise a week is not an overwhelming burden on my time. Neither is 16-24 hours a week of hard work. I admit that much more than that would be problematic.

He goes on to reflect on the Greeks and how they were not an example refuting his position that a true balance of mind and body is impossible.

Our heritage of Greek literature and art is priceless; the example of Greek life possesses for us not the slightest value. The Greeks had nothing alien to study -- not even a foreign or dead language. They read hardly at all, preferring to listen. They were a slave-holding people, much given to social amusement, and hardly knowing what we call industry. Their ignorance was vast, their wisdom a grace of the gods. Together with their fair intelligence, they had grave moral weaknesses. If we could see and speak with an average Athenian of the Periclean age, he would cause no little disappointment -- there would be so much more of the barbarian in him, and at the same time of the decadent, then we had anticipated...

Is he talking about the Athenian blokes who laughed at Aristophanic jokes about getting splinters in their butts from triremes benches? If so I would guess they would be no more primitive (barbaric is an odd word to use to describe the Greeks) than the sailors on Her Majesty's ships, or of the average Briton of his day or of ours. If he's talking about the people attending the Symposium or similar Athenian social events, then he is only right in part.

It is interesting to realize that even the best educated Athenian lacked a Classical education. They were still in the process of learning the hard way the lessons we absorb by reading a thousand years of Greek and Roman history.

The man of thought, as we understand him, is all but necessarily the man of impaired health. The rare exception will be found to come of a stock which may, indeed, have been distinguished by intelligence, but represented in all its members the active rather than the studious of contemplative life; whilst the children of such fortunate thinkers are sure either to revert to the active type or to exhibit the familiar sacrifice of body to mind. I am not denying the possibility of mens sana in corpore sano [A sound mind in a sound body]; that is another thing. Nor do I speak of the healthy people (happily still numerous) who are at the same time brightwitted and fond of books. The man I have in view is he who pursues the things of the mind with passion, who turns impatiently from all common interests or cares which encroach upon his sacred time, who is haunted by a sense of the infinity of thought and learning, who, sadly aware of the conditions on which he holds his mental vitality, cannot resist the hourly temptation to ignore them. Add to these native characteristics the frequent fact that such a man must make merchandise of his attainments, must toil under the perpetual menace of destitution; and what hope remains that his blood will keep the true rhythm, that his nerves will bide the strain of exceptional task? Such a man may gaze with envy at those who 'sweat in the eye of Phobus,' but he knows that no choice was offered him. And if life has so far been benignant as to grant him frequent tranquility of studious hours, let him look from the reapers to the golden harvest, and fare on in thankfulness.

I don't know what to say about this. First I have to note that this is a recurring theme of The Magic Mountain, where Hans also sees a “higher” and spiritual component to sickness and even death. And the examples of Proust and Nietzsche, to name the first two that come to mind, would support this view. I would like to say I myself refute this theory of impaired health being a necessary condition of a serious pursuit of “things of the mind”, but I have reservation here. If I could read Latin and Greek, or even French and German, I would be more confident.

I would, instead, propose Richard Feynman as my counter argument. (As enjoying unimpaired health, not for being athletic.) He was not a literary intellectual of the sort Gissing had in mind, but can you deny that he was a man devoted to the pursuit of “things of the mind?” I think not. He was a born problem solver, as I am. He wanted to know how things worked, to make sense of the world. Math and physics are as intellectual as any literary pursuit, though different.

My passion has always been cosmological, or rather cosmogonical, and this is an intellectual activity that can be pursued anywhere and anytime -- while waiting for trains or while sorting tons of trash.

There is also a tautological character to Gissings argument. The intellectual elite are of a distinctive physical type that we all know and recognize, so anyone who doesn't fit that description is not of the intellectual elite. Maybe we just don't recognize them since they don't fit the pattern. If all you can do is live, and suffer, by your intellect, or if your self-worth is dependent on the recognition of your intellectual works, then you will behave in a particular way. But if you have other skills or interests, if you don't need the recognition, does that mean you aren't as special?

To give Gissing the benefit of the doubt, Ryecroft, who is speaking here, is admittedly not a great talent. He is an inferior Salieri and anything but an Amadeus. He describes the life of the intellectual as Salieri might have described the life of the composer before meeting Mozart. (For clarity, I’m referring to the characters in the movie Amadeus, as I’m not familiar with the historical people.) Or to revert to my previous example, the life of a theoretical physicist isn’t usually considered to include semi-professional drumming, painting, or hanging out in topless bars, yet Richard Feynman tossed off his diagrams -- something I believe other physicists found almost as surprising as the uncertainty principle -- simply to help him make sense of Quantum oddness. I don’t claim to be an expert on Quantum Mechanics, but I think it’s true that Feynman Diagrams are not an extension of the work of previous physicists, as is the case with most work that has resulted in a Nobel Prize. Feynman wasn’t building on the work of others, he created something new that the others didn’t even realize they needed until they saw it. [As usual, there is more to this than I was aware of -- see Alternative Names. Murray Gell-Mann, of course, preferred the name Stueckelberg diagrams and others preferred Feynman-Dyson diagrams. But Freeman Dyson supported the name Feynman diagrams because, “he taught us how to use them.” So it was less out-of-the-blue than I thought but still indicates a fresh way of approaching the science... what can I say, I'm a Feynman fan.]

As a Jane Austen character might have said, perhaps the picture Ryecroft paints of “the man of thought” is rather of one such who "does it ill."

Alpha.

I believe this section was what gave me the idea to do this blog... and the result is a section that violates the structure I’ve established. Perhaps I need to re-consider my structure.

Next: Autumn XVII. After they’ve seen Paree.