Life Work

in memory of Lucy

WORK IS THE ONLY PRACTICAL CONSOLATION FOR HAVING BEEN BORN.

—Miguel de Unamuno

CONSIDER THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, HOW THEY GROW; THEY NEITHER TOIL NOR SPIN.

—Matthew 6:28

ADMIRABLE IS THAT RELIGION OF THE OLD MONKS, LABORARE EST ORARE, WORK IS WORSHIP.

—Thomas Carlyle

O, WHY DON’T YOU WORK
LIKE OTHER MEN DO?
HOW IN HELL CAN I WORK
WHEN THERE’S NO WORK TO DO?

O, I LIKE MY BOSS—
HE’S A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE;
THAT’S WHY I AM STARVING
OUT IN THE BREADLINE.

—The Little Red Songbook

WE MUST WORK THE WORKS OF HIM WHO SENT ME, WHILE IT IS DAY: NIGHT COMES, WHEN NO ONE CAN WORK.

—John 9:4

PREFACE

In the ten years since this book was published, my life and my work have changed utterly. I finished it, after a cancer operation, convinced that I wouldn’t live long. If forebodings were accurate, they were radically misdirected. At the end of Life Work, I wrote, “Today if I begin a thought about 1995 I do not finish the thought.” These words will forever spew irony’s acid. In 1995, it was my wife Jane Kenyon who died, at forty-seven.

As I write in 2003 I am seventy-four, reversing her digits, still breathing and walking and even working. While we were both healthy, as I tell herein, I worked on many projects many hours every day. I excused my workload because it paid the mortgage, tuitions, groceries, cordwood—and accumulated an estate that would support Jane after I died. But when I gave such reasons for my habit of labor, I laughed at myself. Surely I did what I did, not out of prudence, but because I loved doing it.

Maybe I was right the first time. After Jane died I could no longer write children’s books. I tried and failed. When I worked on periodical essays, I had to force them out, excruciating syllable by syllable, and they were no good; I learned to turn down commissions. Revising a textbook I struggled with boredom and lethargy. I made hard work out of a collection of poems for children. All I could do was to write grieving poems about Jane, a book called Without and much of a subsequent collection, but I could concentrate on poetry only an hour or two, and therefore my day was largely empty of work. I missed long hours at the desk, joyfully swimming in language. I had not realized how much my work had derived from the companionate life, how intensely my life was life-with-Jane. When she was first sick I repeated a sentence to myself, “My wife has leukemia,” but it came out, “My life has leukemia.”

This new edition of Life Work appears eight years after her death. Grief has a life of its own and its own work to do. It is born howling, it labors, it grows old. For five years my days were dominated by her absence. Somewhere around the sixth year my life began to take on independence, to find or assume a life of its own. I was able to care for another woman, not in relation to Jane’s absence, but attending to the woman herself. At the same time I returned to the desk in something like the old spirit, enjoying the acts of pen on paper, damn the subject, words and sentences uncoiling down the page in purple, felt-tipped, illegible, revisionary rapture. At seventy-four, I do not think of 2005 without understanding that I may not take part in it, which is only sensible, and which serves to brighten the moment. But I go to bed again looking forward to getting up in the morning—to black coffee, to newspaper, to life and to work.