Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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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

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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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I will—can only—answer for myself, by attempting to explain briefly but truthfully my discovery of my own work, its nature and function in my life, per- haps in the life of the world. I was the son of parents who, like most Americans at the time of the Great Depression, suf- fered profound humiliations—economic and, thus, emotional—which were inevit- ably filtered through their screening love to me, their first child, born in the black winter of 1933. Yet though I was faced in my early years not with actual poverty but certainly with the threat of poverty (the Depression continuing into the Sec- ond War) and though my father (a small-town North Carolinian with only a small-town high-school education) hoped that I would want to study medi- cine, I have no memory of ever wishing to be anything but an artist. At first, a painter; then a musician. But when I had tried and proved to myself that my gifts for painting and music were insufficient; that whatever my ambitions, I could not implement them, then (in my last years of high school) I began to write—poems, stories, novels. Through all those years of IS