In his great book "How to be Idle", Tom Hodgkinson notes that before the Industrial Revolution...
"Work and life were intertwined. A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did 'sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening.' Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down trees or go to watch a public hanging."
This is part of chapter two, entitled "9 a.m.: Toil and Trouble."
10 comments:
Excluding the hanging, what the paragraph describes is similar to the life of artists and craftsmen I've known. I've lived that way for many years.
When I'm working on a project it becomes all encompassing, getting total focus. Yet I somehow find time to do random things. Then back to work. Clocks are meaningless, life becomes circles of work, of distractions with a dash or two of chaos. Sleep is also a time of creative problem solving - often I wake with solutions to problems of the previous day.
When the project is completed all the days of fuss and muss disappear as if they never occurred.
Then on to the next cycle of conceptualization, work and random, variable activities.
That's very much what Hodgkinson goes on to say.
(I'm relieved about the hanging :) )
Hello! I love the evening letter writing, working on a community dam or cherry picking, any in fact except the public hanging! I found you via a link on another blog but cannot now remember which one. Your blog is lovely, graceful and quirky, humorous and enlightening, I love it.
This is my fiorst time to your blog - film, food? WHat could be better. I'll be back.
Wow have things changed... pardon my language - but so many times people say "d*mn the community" instead of doing things for the community, cherry-pick which the projects we need to work on eat fast food then a skinny cow.
Yeah... things have changed...
A Kite Rises and Simply Gluten-free ~ thank you for your lovely comments! I'm looking forward to visiting your blogs. :)
Woodchips ~ there is at least volunteerism, but I had to wait till I found something I truly wanted to partake in, and not something I was doing out of some form of guilt, or to pad the resume.
dear BlogPrincess, thank you for asking me to play tag....regret I can't restrict myself to 6 words on anything, let alone a memoir! got all jittery at the thought.but thanks anyway, it was nice of you to ask
As Oscar Wilde said, doing nothing is hard work.
Excellent. It's nice to know that there are people who are still civic minded!
Volunteerism certainly is alive and dynamic in the US.
Consider a partial list: Every school has volunteers, every political campaign, every youth sports program, every Boy Scout, Cub Scout, Girl Scout, YMCA program, every environmental cause, every church, every hospital, every senior center, every soup kitchen, probably every library ... on it goes ... and all have volunteers
The estimates of total charitable contributions in the U.S. for the year 2006 is $295.02 billion.
Now consider this: Corporate foundation support is included in the overall figure is only 4.3%, or $12.72 billion. That means there are a lot of people giving.
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