lavori di un tempo
Gilmoth
No man is born into the world, whose work
Is not born with him; there is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will:
And blessèd are the horny hands of toil!
So wrote the poet James Russell Lowell, a man whose hands rarely engaged in any sort of toil more difficult than sharpening the nib of his pen. Still, Lowell had a point. There is something singular about engaging in the work of the hands. At its worst, it is an act of skill; at its best, it is an offering and a prayer.
To create a thing using only one’s hands must imbue the thing with some portion of the creator’s pride, or lack of it. And at the end of the day, one can point directly to the tangible result and say “This is what I did today.” That’s a form of gratification denied to even the most lofty of office workers. Blessed are the horny hands of toil? Perhaps. More likely, it seems to me, the blessing comes from those selfsame hands.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
