Topical Guide 670
Mark Dorset
Work: Attitudes Toward
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 10:
“Ariane,” he said, “so what if it’s ridiculous? It’s no reflection on you. It doesn’t make you ridiculous. None of your friends blame you for the fact that you have to wear a ridiculous outfit here. That’s assumed to be my doing, my tastelessness, not yours. You ought to enjoy strutting your stuff in that little outfit, since you don’t have to take any responsibility for it. You’re just my employee. You’re just doing your job. You’ve got to learn the art of ironic detachment.”
“What?”
“Sure. I’ll bet your friends who have jobs know all about it. I did, when I worked for my father. I didn’t know what to call it, but I knew what it was. It starts when you taste what I call the resentment of the employed. You decide that being in someone’s employ is basically the same as being his slave. Now you have to decide what to do about your situation. You can leave, or you can stay. Well, you need some sort of job, so you might as well stay. Since you’re going to stay, you can go on resenting circumstances, or you can sink into them and consent to be what your master thinks you are, or you can step aside from the whole dirty business. You can say to yourself, ‘It’s not really me in this little skirt and stupid hat, just the me I send to work.’ ”
Rampion, in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point:
“The first thing to do is to make them admit that they are idiots and machines during working hours. ‘Our civilization being what it is’—this is what you’ll have to say to them—‘you’ve got to spend eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It’s very disagreeable, I know. It’s humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You’ve got to do it; otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we’ll all starve. Do the job, then, idiotically and mechanically, and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman, as the case may be. Don’t mix the two lives together; keep the bulkheads watertight between them. The genuine human life in your leisure hours is the real thing. […] If you believe in business as service and the sanctity of labor, you’ll merely turn yourself into a mechanical idiot for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four. Admit that it’s dirty, hold your nose, and do it for eight hours, and then concentrate on being a real human being in your leisure. A real complete human being.’ ”
[to be continued]
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