These are Freeman’s lists, the accounting of each day by chores accomplished: Acts of the Apostles of Work.

Freud loved work. At the prime of his life in Vienna, he was said to live by the clock. Compulsiveness? Anyone who loves accomplishment lives by the clock and the list. Freud’s biographer Peter Gay described his workday in his fifties. He went to bed at one in the morning, rose at seven, saw analytic patients from eight to twelve, dined with his family at one, then walked in the city—where he bought cigars, where he did errands like delivering proof—and at three began appointments again. Sometimes he saw patients until nine at night. Supper. Then maybe a card game, maybe another walk with his wife to a cafe, then reading and writing and editing. Freud liked riding horses—and was known to conduct an analysis with a patient riding alongside him. His weekends varied but remained thick with his cherished work. He lectured every Saturday from five to seven, then played cards with a friend. Sunday mornings he visited his mother; Sunday afternoons he wrote letters.

When he grew old and ill he did not change his mind about work; his physical and political circumstances altered, you might say, with the double advent of jaw-cancer and Hitler. He escaped Vienna at the last minute for England but brought his cancer with him, and the prosthesis which made eating and talking possible but which caused him continual pain. In England he wrote the great tragic late work, including Civilization and Its Discontents, in which “discontent” is understatement (or magical euphemism) like the surgeon’s “discomfort.” In his last books, Freud wrote of the wretchedness, torture, and misery fundamental to civilized human life. A major palliative is work: “One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work.” “A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality….” D.H. Lawrence spoke of the task to expand human consciousness, which Freud took upon himself: “Where id was let there ego be.”

But, of course, “the weak point of this method [artist’s or scientist’s] is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes the possession of special dispositions and gifts which are far from being common to any practical degree. And even to the few who do possess them, this method cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no impenetrable armor against the arrows of fortune, …” Then Freud allows himself the mildest allusion to his own suffering: “[this method] habitually fails when the source of suffering is a person’s own body.”

Wesley and Kate harvested vegetables all summer long—peas and beans, carrots and greens, whatever was ripe—first to eat at the daily table and then to preserve. Prodigies of canning occupied my grandmother’s July and August kitchen. Golden Bantam corn heaped the table every night in August; tomatoes raw and cooked sat beside them, and other tomatoes filled rows of Ball jars. Late summer the root vegetables descended to the dirt-floored root cellar.