Work While the Day is Long

Finding Redemption, Sort of, in Labor

We are all worked hard aboard the Exy Johnson, with three weeklong voyages in a row these last weeks and day sails every other day including weekends. We have many days of 12 hours or more and our next day off is a week from today—maybe, if the schedule doesn’t admit some last-minute entry. These are days filled with lifting, hauling, hoisting, pulling, throwing and mustering in the navigation house to get more instructions. After the hauling and lifting we go shopping to provision the ship for another voyage.

These are long days. It’s enough to make you abandon all the ambitions of your youth, all the dreams of eminence and wealth, all the visions of greatness and far-reaching renown, and fame gone aloft to the sky’s very rim. There is not much room for artistic aspiration if your shaking fingers can no longer hold a brush.

It’s enough to make me wonder what the hell I was thinking when I decided to come back here. I am sunburned, dehydrated and bone tired. My penmanship has degenerated into a brutal slash. Parts of my body complain that have never complained before, and loudly.

The future looks equally toilsome, with day sails and mini-voyages through this week to a big celebration of boats on the weekend, known as Fleet Week, during which we will take up to four sails per day--including cannon battles during which we shoot blank charges at each other--and offer the boat for inspection to walk-aboard tourists. Mayhem and madness, is one good description of it.

What can be said about all this tumult? In one sense it’s the hard labor that TV judges always sentence criminals to. In another it’s payback for some vile transgression. Me being a good Protestant I believe it’s penance for my personal sin of failing to make the most—of my time, of money, of good works, of intellectual development.

“In the sweat of your brow you will eat bread, until you return to the ground,” saith the scriptures in a punitive mood.

“Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name!” says Thomas Carlyle, my favorite crazy Victorian. “Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.”

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get by it, but what they become by it,” says John Ruskin, my other favorite crazy Victorian.

What I have become by this work, I would have to say, is a skilled drudge. But in the course of years I have become bigger than I used to be at this job, more responsible and more a respectable citizen of humanity.

I have labored, to the best of my abilities, upon the minute articulation of the soul, such as it is. Carl Jung called it individuation, the teasing out of traits that separate the one from the universal. Jung considered it a healthy thing, though I call it a pain in the ass.

It doesn’t soothe the sunburn but maybe it’s the best we can hope for.