Work: Pile work upon work upon work.

Some 2,800 hundred years ago, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote his didactic poem Works and Days. It is equal parts sibling admonition, theogony (old-school genealogy of the gods), and farming calendar (On the eighth day of the month castrate the boar and roaring bull). But it is the injunction to work that is the crux of the 800-line poem. The message is one that underlies many of the classic texts, not surprisingly, for without work, shame (if not starvation) would haunt our steps.

Even today, in our valley, people are often introduced in conversation as “a hard worker.” And those who don’t work, while not allowed to starve, are held in low esteem — indeed, disclaimed — by their neighbors, pronounced to be “as useless as teats on a boar.” Farming can be a brutally conservative enterprise, one in which animals are dispatched for failing to measure up; it is an occupation in which it is hard to conceal one’s inadequacies.

The nature of work and why we do it has been much on my mind this year. For reasons we won’t explore here, I am all too often witness to the refusal of work and a willingness by adults, mainly men, to reject advancement. As one of like gender, I find those instances in which a healthy man prefers to be idle and stay at home deeply offensive. To be offered work of worth and to instead choose the path of just getting by or, worse, relying wholly on the largess of others is frankly beyond my ken.

Misfortune can be caught in swarms, and easy. The road to it is smooth, and it lives so near.

This is not meant to be some sort of grim Puritan sermon I write, of suppression of desire, harnessed to a yoke until dropping in the traces. For I (as you will surely know by now) put a premium on conviviality with friends, family, and neighbors, on good conversation and laughter, on wine and food.

Then, O then let there be some rock-shadowed cool, some Bilbine wine, a milk-soaked cake and the goats’ last thick milk, the meat of a forest-graised heifer…. O drink the bright wine and relax in the shade with a heart’s fill of food, face tilted into the freshening westerlies.

All of these enjoyments go hand in hand with the work we do. Without the work, each gift (whether necessity or indulgence) would be gained only by throwing oneself at the mercy of community. To be clear, I am a firm believer in the need for a communal safety net; we all at times need a helping hand, for life does indeed break us down. Yet only our hard work allows us to take full satisfaction in the fruits of our labors. It is a pleasure deepened in the owning of the process, embracing it and asking for more, that allows us to claim community among our kith and kin. To expect reward without work is to break with the covenant.

For the granary won’t fill for the feckless.

I understand the tenuous relationship of modern employment to the employed, and I speak today not of that but of our older relationship to each other and our responsibilities to the same. Not all work is based on remuneration; often it is done simply for love, and that is when it is most satisfying.

I am at sea on a raft of frustration with the covenant breakers, whether they be the person who embraces the trappings of his position but spurns the intellectual rigor required to do the job well or the one who refuses an opportunity because “it sounds like too much work.” It is not seemly to enjoy the glass of wine without the earning, to expect honors without the requisite work of ambition.

And if you haven’t broken the bond, then May another year take good root beneath the soil.

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Reading this weekend: Hesiod’s Works and Days: A New Translation by Kimberly Johnson (2017).