224: Another aside.
Little Follies, “The Young Tars,” Chapter 10
10
ANOTHER ASIDE. I was surprised and, I must admit, annoyed, to discover, as I described my guilty feelings about working on the “Tales for Tars,” deceiving my father by disguising work I wanted to do as work I had to do, how little my attitude toward work that brings pleasure has changed. I still feel guilty when I’m doing such work, still feel that if I’m having a good time I must not be working hard enough, still feel that work that brings pleasure can’t be real work. One of the most persistent and pernicious of the wrong ideas I learned in school, an idea reinforced by my father’s attitude toward his work at the gas station, and by his attitude toward the avocations my grandfathers pursued—Guppa’s tinkering, Big Grandfather’s boatbuilding—was the idea that work, real work, was not a pleasure. One might derive a little backhanded pleasure from seeing a job done at last (pleasure of the I-keep-hitting-myself-on-the-head-because-it-feels-so-good-when-I-stop variety, the kind of pleasure celebrated in beer commercials: “Hey, you made it through another day on that lousy job! It’s time to pop open a frosty Lethe and forget the whole dirty business!”), but, according to my father and to many of my teachers (I exclude half a dozen magnificent ones), the pleasure didn’t come from the work itself. I’m sorry that they never knew what pleasure comes from working well, that when you’re working as well as you can you’re inclined to giggle, and that when you find yourself, once in a rare while, working better than you ever thought you could, the feeling is so euphoric that a tingle runs across your back and you have a suspicion that you might be growing wings.
[to be continued on Monday, March 28, 2022]
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