Autumn XV. Blackberries

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn XIV. Suffering + Acorns, trees, and Feng Shui

Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory something of long ago, I had somehow escaped into the country, and, on a long walk began to feel mid-day hunger. The wayside brambles were fruiting; I picked and ate, and ate on, until I had come within sight of an inn where I might have made a meal. But my hunger was satisfied; I had no need of anything more, and, as I thought of it, a strange feeling of surprise, a sort of bewilderment, came upon me. What! Could it be that I had eaten, and eaten sufficiently, without paying? It struck me as an extraordinary thing... The average educated man has never stood alone, utterly alone, just clad and nothing more than that, with the problem before him of wresting his next meal from a world that cares not whether he live or die. There is no such school of political economy. Go through that course of lectures, and you will never again become confused as to the meaning of elementary terms in that sorry science.

I understand, far better than most men, what I owe to the labour of others. This money which I “draw” at the four quarters of the year, in a sense falls to me from heaven; but I know very well that every drachm is sweated from human pores. Not, thank goodness, with the declared tyranny of basest capitalism; I mean only that it is the product of human labour; perhaps wholesome, but none the less compulsory. Look far enough, and it means muscular toil, that swinking of the ruder man which supports all the complex structures of our life. When I think of him thus, the man of the people earns my gratitude. That it is gratitude from afar, that I never was, and never shall be, capable of democratic fervour, is a characteristic of my mind which I long ago accepted as final. I have known revolt against the privilege of wealth (can I not remember spots in London where I have stood, savage with misery, looking at the prosperous folk who passed?), but I could never feel myself at one with the native poor among whom I dwelt. And for the simplest reason; I came to know them too well. He who cultivates his enthusiasm amid graces and comforts may flourish an illusion with regard to the world below him all his life long, and I do not deny that he may be better for it; for me, no illusion was possible. I knew the poor and I knew that their aims were not mine.... What they at heart desired, was to me barren; what I coveted, was to them for ever incomprehensible....

Alpha.

I can’t really disagree with Ryecroft here. For me the greatest value of driving a taxi while at university was that it showed me what the real world, and real people, were like. My favorite insight was that the average person does not need bookcases because that average person does not own books. When I did see a few books they were what I considered trash. The world is rich in ignorance.

But there is something else in this section that interests me. This is, I believe, the most he says about the money he lives on. I take it to be an annuity, though there are probably other possibilities. In any event it is probably rather similar to my charitable gift annuities and my Social Security income in that the funds going in came from my work (and the work of my parents) which has been invested (or squandered) so that I am currently drawing on the work of people still contributing to Social Security and, depending on how the charities manage their funds, the economy as a whole. So I do probably owe something to fast food workers, Apple Computer designers, Google programmers, and airplane assemblers -- though maybe not coal miners or oil well drillers given the concerns of my charities. And there is probably some agricultural toil as well: People running tractors, picking crops, minding livestock. The sad thing really is that there is much less of the "muscular toil" Ryecroft alludes to, as that is really all that many people in any economy are capable of. In the past century we've "improved" things to the point that many people can not find work that they can perform, and so have no place in the economy they live in. Ryecroft, and anyone with a Classical Education, would recognize this picture from the decline of Rome when the free farmers were forced off the land and into the cities by the rise of slave powered latifundia.

Next: Autumn XVI. Physical work.