“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.” – Walden, Henry David Thoreau

 

Keith Wiltshire (Aged 76, retired teacher who taught in Malaysia, the United Kingdom & Singapore; resides in Bristol, UK):

"Poverty. Insufficiency of any or all of these: food, clothing, housing, health, companionship.

Abundance. Adequate amounts of all of the above.

Why is there poverty? Lack of imagination by the wealthy. SELFISHNESS (Refusal to love your global neighbour as yourself) and the sad fact that as the planet is depleted by the wealthy who are the major cause of global warming it will be the poor who suffer most from the collapse of systems which now seems inevitable.

[Just remembered: Keith had taught me English literature at an elite junior college which academically had an intensively competitive environment. Before I left he autographed a text he taught, Gulliver's Travels, and in it drew his Oxford college crest and his own motto beneath -- labore nihil delectat ("to do nothing delights me"). I still have that copy of Swift somewhere.

And from a group email sent out by him] --

Our Garden

I have been stimulated to write this to all of you by Sanjay Perera's questionnaire about poverty & affluence [abundance] - & the undeniable fact that although our income is too low to have to pay Income Tax, we are nevertheless affluent.

It has become a custom for us to hold a garden party at midsummer (which is also our wedding anniversary) so for those who have not yet attended such an event I intend to describe our back garden, where a good deal of our time is spent.

It faces due south, is about 100 yards long & 30 wide. There are two plum trees, one yellow, one red, which are as old as the house (and us), situated near the border fence, one half-way along, the other overshadowing the patio which is just outside the French windows of the house. In the centre is a magnolia tree which we have just reduced to its size when we moved in ten years ago, thus allowing more light into the garden. I have recently dug 3 new beds formerly under its (admittedly beautiful) shade.

Our garden philosophy is that anything can grow wherever it wishes unless there is a good reason why it should not - there are therefore plenty of buttercups & daisies sprinkled over the grassy area immediately beyond the patio with flowers springing up among the vegetables & various Spring flowers (daffodils, primulas, violets) under what remains of the magnolia. There are also still 2 bay trees, & 2 apple trees (one cookers, one eaters) & a sprawling tree at the end of the garden just before the laurel hedge which separates us from the 1970s houses which were erected just beyond the line of the original Roman Road from the port of Abonae (at the bottom of the hill) & Bath.

There are easily movable chairs & benches and grassy paths between the vegetable beds which are sometimes guarded, as at present by four-foot tall foxgloves with streams of tiny florets (blue, white, purple, pink) inhabited by honey-bees which are having a revival this year after years of decline in the country. The pink of camelia bushes is now over - as are the magnolia & weigelia (3 more sizable bushes), & the peonies. (There are many other colourful flowers here & there but only the Head Gardener knows the names & how to spell them!)

We have 4 compost bins into which we tip our grass cuttings, kitchen waste etc. for worms to turn into magnificent soil improver after a few months. These are all along the western edge of the garden & between them, clinging to the fence are blackberry bushes. In the middle of the southern sector of the garden are soft fruits: gooseberries, raspberries, redcurrants, loganberries (all of which are also represented in our store cupboard full of jam jars filled by Pauline last year - as well as a few remaining in our freezer). You will have gathered that, as far as possible we try to feed ourselves but are somewhat handicapped by our inability to grow rice or bananas, though we do have plenty of potato & cabbage beds & rows of beans, peas, garlic scattered among the nigella (blue flowers known colloquially as 'love in the mist").

This year's party is for the local Green Party to reflect on their election results (we only have one MP - but the Labour Party started with one, and we held our City Council seat with a different candidate). Many people told me that they would like to vote Green but would have to vote LibDem [Liberal Democrat] to keep the Tories out - so much for tactical voting!

P.S. Further reading: The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry a Kentucky farmer & poet; also this poem by Louis Macneice written just before the 2nd World War started:

THE SUNLIGHT ON THE GARDEN

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying.

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too

For sunlight on the garden.”

To end, Thoreau's journals have some interesting stuff as in an entry on Oct. 4, 1851:

“...Minot is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer – who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer's life – that I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking for a sale of his crops or any pecuniary profit, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields him. He has not too much land to trouble him, -- too much work to do...but simply to amuse himself and live. He cares not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well. He knows every pin and every nail in his barn. If another linter is to be floored, he lets no hired man rob him of that amusement, but he goes slowly to the woods and, at his leisure, selects a pitch pine tree, cuts it, and hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill; and so he knows the history of his barn floor.”

Then on Oct. 6, 1851:

“To Fair Haven Pond by boat, the moon four-fifths full, not a cloud in the sky: paddling all the way. In the middle of the pond we tried the echo. As we paddled down the stream with our backs to the moon, we saw the reflection of every wood and hill on both sides distinctly. These answering reflections – shadow to substance – impress the voyager with a sense of harmony and symmetry, as when you fold a blotted paper and produce a regular figure, -- a dualism which nature loves. What you commonly see is but half. Home at ten.”

[After first click on video, click it second time at link "Watch on Youtube". For those who have the patience: try at some stage to find a quiet time, close your eyes, and focus on just listening to the audio of the video.]

Dear Friends

Some interesting and timely extracts from Stud Terkel’s famous book Working where various people were interviewed in the early '70s on what they thought about their work.

Till today, being ethical in daily life seems difficult to ground into ‘reality’.

Nick Lindsay (Carpenter/Poet)

[page 520]

“…It seems like the vast comedy of things when a Yankee come and got us to build their H-bomb, part of the fine comedy that she should come and give us the first living wage since the War of Northern Aggression – for this.

In Bloomington, Indiana, I saw a lot of women make their living making bombs. They had a grand picnic when they built the millionth bomb. Bombs they’re dropping on people. And the students came to demonstrate against the bombs. Maybe these women see no sense in what they’re doing but they see their wages in what they’re doing…

…Work’s quite a territory. Real work and fake work. There’s fake work, which is the prostitution. There is the magic of payday, though. You’ll say, ‘Well, if you get paid for your work, is that prostitution?’ No indeed. But how are you gonna prove it’s not? A real struggle there. Real work, fake work, and prostitution. The magic of payday. The groceries now heaped on the table and the new-crop wine and store-bought shirts. That’s what it says, yes.”

Nora Watson (Editor)

[pages 523-24]

“A guy was in the office next to mine. He’s sixty-two and he’s done. He came to the Institution in the forties. He saw the scene and said: ‘Yes, I’ll play drone to you. I’ll do all the piddly things you want. I won’t upset the apple cart by suggesting anything else.’ With a change of regimes in our department, somebody came across him and said, ‘Gee, he hasn’t contributed anything here. His mind is set in old attitudes. So we’ll throw him out.’ They fired him unceremoniously, with no pension, no severance pay, no nothing. Just out on your ear, sixty-two. He gets back zero from having invested so many years playing the game.

The drone has his nose to the content of the job. The politicker has his nose to the style. And the politicker is what I think our society values. The politicker, when it’s apparent he’s a winner, is helped. Everyone who has a stake in being on the side of the winner gives him a boost. The minute, I finally realized the way to exist at the Institution – for the short time I’ll be here – was not to break my back but to use it for my own ends, I was a winner.

…When you ask most people who they are, they define themselves by their jobs. ‘I’m a doctor.’ ‘I’m a radio announcer.’ ‘I’m a carpenter.’ If somebody asks me, I say, ‘I’m Nora Watson.’ At certain points in time I do things for a living. Right now I’m working for the Institution. But not for long. I’d be lying to you if I told you I wasn’t scared.

I have few options. Given the market. I’m going to take the best job I can find. I really tried to play the game by the rules, and I think it’s a hundred percent unadulterated bullshit. So I’m not likely to go back downtown and say, ‘Here I am. I’m very good, hire me.’

You recognize yourself as a marginal person. As a person who can give only minimal assent to anything that is going on in this society: ‘I’m glad electricity works.’ That’s about it. What you have to find is your own niche that will allow you to keep feeding and clothing and sheltering yourself without getting downtown. (Laughs.) Because that’s death. That’s really where death is.”

Walter Lundquist (Industrial Designer)

[Pages 525-27]

“…I wanted to be at the drawing board, creative, doing something I believed in. But I became a pimp. I didn’t start drinking until I was thirty…I found I could out drink any of my clients. They got drunk I didn’t. What an absurd way to live! To make money because you could booze it up and cater to someone else’s frailty. His need for a boot licker’s comradeship, listening to his cheap jokes at some expensive bar. I got work alright, but it made me sick. I couldn’t stand it.

We had a client who was providing additives to meats and food preparations. My job was to make it into a trade publication ad. I'm sitting at these meetings with the president of the company and the sales manager. We’re out to provide a service to the meat packers so they can cheat government analysts who are going to inspect the sausages. They don’t see it as cheating. I say, ‘Why are we doing this ad for mustard?’ They say, ‘Mustard acts as a binder.’ It holds together the globules of fat the client is putting in. So we make a living selling mustard because the guy wants to put fat instead of meat protein in there. So the public's being cheated and these sons of bitches are out there playing golf…

…The turning point in my life was the death of my father. It was a funny thing. Here you’re watching a beautiful guy with white hair lying in his bed, dying of a heart attack. You hear him ramble and wander and talk about his life: ‘I was never anything. I didn’t do a job even in raising my children. I didn’t mean anything…’ You watch death. Then you say, ‘Wait a minute. What’s going on with him is going to hit me. What am I doing between now and my death? If you take actuarial tables of insurance companies, I’m running on borrowed time.’ You begin to assess yourself and that’s a shock. I didn’t come up smelling like a rose. ‘Am I going to go on forever being a goddamn pimp? What’s the alternative? Is there another way of earning a living?’

…At this moment I have a job on the drawing board that’s pretty good. This one client has some degree of conscience. It’s an ecology poster for children, given away as a premium. It’s a beautiful thing to hang on the wall, acquainting a child with the cycle of life.

…I’m struggling to survive. I’m running out of funds. I may have to pimp again for survival’s sake. But I’ll not give up the sane work. I’m scurrying about. If it doesn’t work, I may do somewhat what young people do and drop out. I’ll stop existing in society. I’ll work on a road crew. I’ll cut lumber of whatever the hell it’ll be. But I’ll never again play the full-time lying dishonest role I’ve done most of my life.

Once you wake up the human animal you can’t put it back to sleep again.”

In the twenty first century, so far, not much has changed since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (read the uncensored original edition).

And now, for a little burst of freedom: