Adam and Eve were hunter-gatherers. Agriculture is the fall of man, raising and caring for flocks of animals or tilling the soil to raise crops—and it is a fall because it introduces work; God said so: “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread….” Bread is a major metaphor of the Bible, Old Testament and New. We ask for bread and are given a stone. Jesus’s flesh is bread, and transubstantiation makes metaphor literal. First bread is sustenance; then as metonomy it is one class of nutriment for all; then nutriment moves from bodies to souls.
Metaphor over the aeons has given folks trouble. Thus in the Living Bible Isaiah—who spoke of “bread” in older translations—asks, “why spend your money on foodstuffs?”
Maybe labor is the fall, not work. Hannah Arendt’s distinction in The Human Condition is both fundamental and fundamentally obscured by the culture of our century: “the distinction between productive and unproductive labor contains … the more fundamental distinction between work and labor. It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind …” Culture’s thrust has twisted our language: “From the standpoint of ‘making a living,’ every activity unconnected with labor becomes a ‘hobby.’ ”
The best day has its corollary. When I draw back from making these sentences, to think about the book I am making—as I walk the dog or drive the car—I worry that my enthusiasm over work, over the best day (over my own life, over the way I choose to live) will seem to a saturnine or grumpy reader the ultimate in complacency—complacency raised to the point of monstrosity. Why is happiness unforgivable? It is, and my sanguine temperament as I write about work alters the day’s progress into a vision as idealized as de Crevecoeur’s when he imagines his American farmer; or as Addison and Steele’s when they invent the benign Sir Roger de Coverley; or as Henry Adams’s creating maryolatrous Normans; or as John Ruskin’s and Ezra Pound’s fabricating Renaissance Princes. I make for myself a golden age.
Only depressives make a golden age; or maniacs create a golden age because their dark brother lurks behind the barn.
The best day is real—but takes its power and its energy from the urgency of its contradiction. It is not only blood chemistry that dictates ups and downs but the circumstances of anybody’s life. What is the worst day? One worst day is the blank page of apathy or depression, when like Oblomov we see no reason to get out of bed. I remember lying alone in abed smoking cigarettes, reading the cracks in the ceiling; for two years of middle life, my private life was a mess and I wrote no poems; depression rolled like the waves of mid-ocean day after day after day. Messages arrived coded into images and rhythms—I stuck some into notebooks—but I could not worry them onto the page, could not absorb myself at a desk. During these years I wrote a documentary play; I drafted a New Yorker profile of Henry Moore … but when I tried working on poems restlessness combined with nausea and anxiety: I could do nothing. Two years later, poetry made a brief return—but then three or four years afterwards (my late thirties and early forties) depression returned with a different face. I worked—desultorily, in short stretches—and finished things, and published them, but for six years I was aware that nothing I wrote was good enough; nothing was equal to a few things I had done earlier.