Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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First, from want—physical want, hun- ger, cold, disease. But I have suggested a society which would supply these wants. Exactly so. In such a society I would work to be free of others. Free from prolonged eco- nomic obligation to the state, which is self-diminishing (and a man's obligations to his state increase paradoxically and terrifyingly as that state becomes increas- ingly impersonal, unreachable). But at least as necessary, free through the exer- cise of my proud and growing skill from other human beings, free even from those people I love, especially them. This will require explanation. I do not mean that I would wish to be—or would ever be- come—free of the duties and debts of love toward my kin, partners, friends. What I mean is that only through my own early discovery of, cultivation of, absorption in some work—building houses, teaching school, laying roads, writing novels—could I free myself from the crippling emotional dependence upon other human beings which infects and afflicts any man who has nothing in his life upon which he can rely, nothing 16

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There may be no reason why a man should work, provided he lives in a so- ciety which charitably supports its un- employed. The only abstract reason for working may in fact be that a God exists who created man and set man to work to glorify His creation. (The second chapter of Genesis says that God made Adam and put him in the garden to till it and keep it.”) If a man does not acknowledge such a God—and his own duties to God—then perhaps he is a fool to work. Let him sleep till noon seven days a week, leave the house only to cash his welfare checks, buy his beer and re- turn to watch television all afternoon, half the night, surrounded by his loud and growing family. Yet—to speak of myself—even if I did not acknowledge God, even if I were adequately supported by the state, I am sure that I would work. And my first, simplest reason for working would be one universally expressed in proverbs— that The Devil finds work for idle hands. But my next reason would be that one expressed in the motto which Adolf Hitler cruelly inscribed across the one-way gates into many of his death camps: Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Makes Free. Few if any men freed themselves from Dachau or Belsen or Auschwitz by the work required of them there. But the truth of the motto survives that hideous distortion. Work frees a man. Frees him from what, though? 15

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more permanent than other people. A craft, a skill may—given good health— last a man all his life; very few friends, wives, sons, daughters will prove as en- during. Age, disease, death—and worst, disloyalty—exist and will in time win all that we love. The hardest shield for our- selves will be our work, if we have troubled to discover and master and com- mit ourselves to some rewarding work. But our selves also exist and are as frail, vulnerable as any other person we may have loved. Yet it is ourselves which will remain true to us longest of all. All our weaknesses—our vanity, greed, dis- honesty, cruelty, fickleness—will accom- pany us closely to our graves. What shield is there then against our own loyal flaws? What may free us from ourselves, our final enemy?—work, perhaps only work, the daily commitment to a task which will demand from us full and strenuous exercise of our strongest selves; our com- prehending, foreseeing, order-creating minds, our miraculously complex physical competence. . So work frees a man. Yet I have only spoken negatively, denyingly of the things work frees us from. The difficult but necessary question remains—what things can a man’s work free him for? 17