Pamela's Blog 19

Published on Monday, June 8, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The Good Livers”

by Pamela Satterwhite

The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialize, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to cooperate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers… (Virginia Woolf)

I know a carpenter who’s been told he was a wide-trunked tree in a past life…because he’s so solid and of like girth…and because he has an affinity for wood.

Perhaps.

Perhaps if a large tree suddenly grabbed up its roots and walked among us, it, too, would find delight in everything, be curious about the inner-workings of machinery, see things as they are, beneath the facade – and have zero tolerance for bullshit. Who knows? It might even have that bubbly laugh, that silly grin – and a taste for beer.

When it comes to beer, perhaps he’s too fond – at least I thought so at first, liking a little asceticism in the people whose hands touch this house. But then I noticed how gently he caressed a particularly fine grain of wood he was showing me, and the tender way he held the tiny stray cat I was hoping to find a home for, and doubt dissolved.

For him it’s a non-issue: “I work hard and I play hard,” he says. He made a convert of me.

Marx once observed that as the power of money grows, we become less:

Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving – and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvelous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave.

Two sides of the same coin…

The pitiful-power-drunk-few hope we will ever and always only mirror their money-seekingness, their narrow priorities, and renounce the need to be large, pacific souls…gracious…fun-loving…generous…interested in understanding how everything works…and learning whatever it is we need to know to make things work…

…large enough to tackle the big questions, like: what world do we want?

…and then to make it…with our own hands, united with our own brains…

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Pamela's Blog 19

Published on Monday, June 8, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The Good Livers”