I’ve been making my way through my list of saved stories on The New Yorker website / app. This one from 2017 by the great American writer and Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison was one of the first I read and liked. In it she writes about her experiences in her first job and the lessons she learned from her father, summarised at the end:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.
The importance of being yourself, family and health above all else.
I also recently heard about a quote frequently misattributed to Toni Morrison but which actually came from a friend of hers. It comes from a piece from The Nation’s 150th anniversary issue entitled ‘No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear‘ which she wrote on 26th December 2004, the day after the presidential re-election of George W. Bush. That day Mrs. Morrison was depressed and unable to write because of the election results but her friend rebuked her saying:
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.
I can’t help but think it’s as relevant now, if not more so, in the Trump-age than it was then. However, like I mentioned in a previous post, it’s not when everything is fine, but in times of dread when we should be strong and go to work. ‘Fortis in adversis’.
My Excerpts 