It’s May Day! The day before
my birthday! The pagan fertility holiday! International Workers’ Day! And as I
draw (sort of) nearer to the end of my career as a graduate student, I have been
exploring career options, soul searching, and imagining what my life might be
like when my doctoral degree is proverbially
in hand (but really hanging on my wall). In short, I have been thinking about
labor: What is it? How is it compensated? What “counts” as legitimate labor in
the world I inhabit? I have more or
less decided that I do not want to follow in the footsteps of Professor X, but
am still uncertain about what kind of labor I would like to engage in, or what
I want to be when I grow up.
Labor: The word implies
difficult work, putting a great deal of effort into something. But it is also
the term for the process of child birth, suggesting that while labor is
difficult and even painful, it is also productive, vital.
The carpenter labors. We know,
because we can see the house he has built. We hear him driving nails, see his back bend beneath the weight of boards and bricks. We can quantify his work, and
reimburse him with a paycheck. We understand the labor that others do by the
products they create and
through our imaginative empathy for their efforts. When we benefit from someone
else’s labor, are we not grateful? Within that very sentiment, we acknowledge and affirm our own belief that labor is the not-fun, not-pleasant enemy of leisure. But are we
right to do so?
Leisure: Free time, in the
sense of being both unoccupied and unpaid. What we do at our leisure, we do for
our own enjoyment, for the pleasure it brings us. These activities are their
own reward, or so we are told.
But labor and leisure are a
false dichotomy that is based on the way that others compensate us for our
time. What if I write a magazine article, and I put a great deal of effort or labor into it, but I also enjoy that
effort? Maybe the story I craft becomes a blueprint of narrative in my reader’s imagination. Perhaps I select
and join my words in such a way that they are like irregular stones which are
cemented together, forming a firm foundation upon which a literary image can be built. If I do this for free (like I do
in this blog), is this a laborious leisure activity? If I get paid to write the
article, is it leisurely labor? This blog: what is it? If you read it, and you
gain some pleasure or insight from the text, are you not glad that you have read
it? Are you not also grateful (as you would be to the carpenter) that you did
not have to do the writing (or building) yourself?
