Topical Guide 719
Mark Dorset
Work: The Right Thing and the Time It Takes
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 36:
(Grandfather had made that screen door when he was a boy, under the guidance and watchful eye of his father. The screens were held in place in the frame by half rounds of wood, and Grandfather had done all the work by hand: cutting the wood, assembling the door, stretching the screens, hanging the door and truing it. And every year—or at least every year since I first noticed—he would scrape the loose paint and touch up the bare spots, painstakingly painting the half rounds that held the screens in place, slowly, so slowly, so that he wouldn’t get paint onto the screens themselves, teaching me—but only by the way, without a word—that some work not only takes time, but needs time, as if it were alive, and had its needs.)
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities:
The right thing and the time it takes are connected by a mysterious force, just like a piece of sculpture and the space it fills.
See also:
Work, Labor TG 5; Endless Tasks TG 86; Tasks, Sisyphean TG 89; Day Jobs; Working at Cross-Purposes TG 120; Educational Publishing TG 111; Work versus Play TG 367; Work as a Stultifying Waste of Time TG 485; Work, Persistence, Endurance, Survival, Humiliation TG 527; The Light Touch TG 617; “The Builder’s Look,” Self-Congratulation, Disappointment TG 617; The Right Thing and the Time It Takes TG 618
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