Familiaris

by David Wroblewski

Yet a third part of him rose to object: What about satisfaction taken in the work? The group effort? The collective endeavor, which was infinitely more than one man could accomplish on his own? Was there no glory among the lunch boxes and metal shavings? And if not, was that a failure of his imagination, or a truth about the world?

But couldn’t both be true? A job was a job, nothing more—not a family, not worth loyalty, much less love. Yet at the same time, a factory truly was like the world. It contained friendship and grace and catastrophe and victory and striving and romance and laughter and betrayal—if you knew to watch for those things. If you knew how to see those things, which not everyone did.

Each book fascinated in its own right, and startling correspondences emerged, but not one page in any of them addressed the perplexing question of how life and work might combine to reveal a larger meaning—a something beyond something.

“It is your first and last duty in this life,” he wrote, “not to be an idiot.”