O Happy Day (fish stew recipe)

[Carl Remick]

>No need here, brother. I perform all manner of blue-collar work to
>supplement my writing income. As for the Yoshies and Dougs who prefer a
>dandified, salon socialism, so be it. I'm not into the Khmer Rouge/Maoist
>concept of forcing intellectuals to shovel pig shit at gunpoint (though the
>image of people like Jonathan Alter, Eric Alterman, Joe Conason, Cokie
>Roberts, Chris Matthews, the entire FOX News prime time line-up, et al.,
>stooped over steaming piles of swine dung does bring a smile to my lips).
>They'll never know the dignity of inspired labor, of a physical job
>well-done, of the sweet soreness one feels the day after some heavy 
>lifting,
>hammering, digging. What matters it?
>
>DP

[OTOH, we have this passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, a 
roman a clef about the Transcendentalists' experiment in communal living, 
Brook Farm.  I'm pretty sure I posted this to the list once before long ago, 
but it's one of my favorites.]

The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming 
practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease to be anything 
else.  While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with 
delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor.  It was to be our form 
of prayer and ceremonial of worship.  Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover 
some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun.  Pausing in 
the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were 
to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth.  In this 
point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated.  It 
is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of 
my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of 
earth and sky.  There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, 
on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at 
unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask 
with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals.  But this was all.  
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.

[end of excerpt]

Carl

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