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Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind, according to Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century historian. Of course, for Carlyle “work” was sitting at the desk in his study writing essays. The only manual labor he ever had to do was to carry his school books. It’s curious that the people who most often praise the nobility of labor are people who haven’t done any.
And yet it’s true; there can be a sort of nobility attached to common labor, to the thankless physical tasks that must be done in any society. It’s even more true when you consider the word “noble” comes from the same Greek root as the word “know.” People who engage in hard physical labor know the world differently than those of us who engage in intellectual work. They know a different reality and attain a different wisdom.
There is nobility to manual labor. But the only people truly qualified to speak of it are those who do the labor, and they’re too tired. Indeed, some of that nobility comes from their silence on the subject. They understand the only way to truly appreciate the nobility of labor is to take your turn at the wheelbarrow.
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
