> Like Michael, I grew up on a farm. Unlike Michael, the effect it had
> on me was to make me dislike any activity that involves
> direct exposure
> to sunlight. Even picking the red raspberry bushes we have in our
> back yard I regard as a necessary but unpleasant task justified only
> by its results.
I'm reminded of a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852), which was in part a satiric commentary on the Transcendentalists' communal Brook Farm. Protagonist Miles Coverdale complains about the burdens of farm labor as follows: "The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance."
I've always thought this passage amusing -- though I disagree with it to some extent. I find a certain amount of hard physical work -- gardening, in particular -- refreshing. For one thing, it demands a good deal of right-brain creativity -- which is a pleasant change of pace following onerous left-brain activity (like this list). I hasten to add that I realize there is all the difference in the world between doing a job as a pleasant set-your-own-pace diversion and performing it as backbreaking exploited labor.
I will add, though, that I think William Gladstone was nuts to find any relaxation at all in his favorite hobby: chopping down huge trees.
Carl