To Toil or Not

For the last three trips to the library I have pulled a book from the shelves entitled "Cities in Civilization" by Sir Peter Hall and read a bit of it. Each of the previous two times I've returned it to the shelves, not because it is uninteresting -- quite the contrary -- but because it is a thousand pages long! But, the last trip I succumbed and checked it out.

I got only to the seventh page before I knew it was going to be a REALLY GOOD book. There, you see, he quotes John Maynard Keynes on the subject of toil. Do be an egghead and read it through.

The most advanced nations may eventually enter, may indeed already be entering, that blissful state imagined in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes: a condition where we no longer need care about the basic economic problem of survival that has plagued the human race since its beginning, but are able at last to do only the things we find agreeable and pleasurable. Keynes unforgettably wrote: `Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well'! But, Keynes warned, none of us can look forward to this new and permanent golden age with any equanimity. For, he pointed out, we have been trained too long to work, not to enjoy. It would be a huge problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy him or herself without work; if one needed evidence, one could merely look at the melancholy record of the rich minority anywhere. We would need, as so few of us can, to `take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin'.

Smart fellow, Keynes.

But, having already toiled with the Mountain Maples before reading this, I went onto the battlefield once again this morning to issue the coup de grace to the few remaining quick among the dead with a squirt or two of DJ Hardware's (the store the farmers use; not Farmer's Hardware, the one they don't) best weed killer, some ten times stronger than what you can buy at one of these big-box home improvement center.

View from the garden.
Sure wish I had come across Keynes before the Book of Genesis because I could have been up there on the deck in the Lounge Lizard the last few days, reading a good book on how best to not toil!

But, now I will ... right after I finish the housecleaning.