Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of LifeDreiser, Theodore
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Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life
Dreiser, Theodore
American essays -- 20th century
In the progress of the work, however, it was given me to see that, in
the production of all things here, there is at bottom this very
formlessness innate. For to organize and perfect one thing we must take
from and destroy another; and in doing that we fly in the face of that
which we most desire: order and harmony. Therefore, if we would have
that which the inexplicable urge for something new and more beautiful
commands, we must apparently steel our hearts against the old and
destroy it, although, having committed the offense of destruction, we
must repay or balance by the labor of construction.
It is not given to all of us to follow the ramifications of Nature’s
planning nor to see wherein justice or the seeming injustice lies. Most
of those about me--average short-reasoning creatures--took their labor
drearily enough and were not able to see in any definite inspiriting way
the approaching beauty of that which their hands were building. It did
not concern them. Many of them came and labored but a little while,
doing but a minute portion of that which was to be the whole, seeing
only the mass and chaos of it without ever obtaining one glimpse of the
loveliness which was to be.
But when the labor had been completed, when the mortar had been mixed
and the brick and stone removed from their uneven masses and set in
order, when the wounds of the earth had been smoothed over, the
scattered débris removed and the grass allowed to grow, when in the
light of the restful evening there rose, in this instance, high in the
air a perfect tower, buttressed, arched and pinnacled, with here a
window reflecting the golden Western glow and there a pillar standing
out in delicate relief against the perfect background of the sky, the
meaning of the chaos came home. Here it was: color, form, tone, beauty.
The labor of the excavator, the toil of the iron-worker, the irritating
beats of the carpenters’ hammers, the mess and disorder of the field of
action, had all blended together finally and made this perfect
thing--only they were no longer a part of it. To most of them it was all
but meaningless. Having labored on but portions of it they could
scarcely conceive it as a whole.
And yet as I looked my heart rose up, and I, for one, was thankful to
have been in part a worker, to have worked a little, to have wearied a
little, to have sighed a little, that so lovely a thing might be.
II.
The toil of the laborer is thoughtless. There is in it neither
conception nor initiative nor the development of that which is new.
Though the hands labor and the body bend, the heart is not in it. It is
all a weariness and a travail of the flesh, and the profit is unseen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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