December 5, 2006

Dear Colleague:

    We have only a short time to live and every moment of it is precious to us. We certainly try to live as long as possible, going through the rigors of diet, medication, and exercise to add a year or two to our life span. We want more time, and we value what we have, which is why we hate to be kept waiting at someone else's pleasure, for that suggests that our time—our life—is at another's disposal.

    Yet equally obvious is the fact that time is a burden to us. We do our best to be rid of it, fidget, watch the clock, hoping that it will go away, which amounts to hoping that life will go away, slip through our fingers unobtrusively like dry beach sand. Kill time! What a strange expression when we are supposed to value life. We try to kill time on our own, using the newspaper, solitaire, crossword puzzle, or alcohol as instrument. This amounts to suicide. Will some other person do the killing for me? "Who will rid this obnoxious priest (Thomas à Becket) for me?" cried Henry II. He couldn't bring himself to do it. His knights heard the cry and murdered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral for him. When I read this story, I automatically transpose it to time. I am Henry II, and cry out, "Who will rid burdensome time for me?" Too much of a coward to kill time myself, I ask help from others. And they willingly oblige, for when they drug me in parlor games and social chitchat they also drug themselves—they also numb themselves from intolerable time and life.    

    Work—the work we have to do to earn a living—is our salvation. In the end, only work is worthy of our time, only work fulfills and justifies our life. What about playing golf in Florida, fishing in the cool mountain streams of Colorado, or spending more time with one's buddies in the tavern? Well, none of these activities remotely measures up to work, and the test is this: However much we like any of these pastimes, as play or hobby we can do it for only a limited time. Only work, be it building houses, driving trucks, or teaching students, is challenging and important enough to engage us for forty hours a week, month after month, year after year.

    Why? Well, I have been unkind to Darwin and his theory of biological evolution in the last few letters. I want to make up for this slight by commending his theory this time. Work is more important than play because we are adapted evolution-wise to work—to sweating and straining over a task, not just for a while when we are in the mood, which will make it into play, but for long periods of time both when we are in the mood and when we are not.

    Karl Marx doesn't seem to realize that workers are blessed because they have to work. Once the Communist utopia comes into existence, and no one really needs to work and everyone can fish in the morning, write poetry in the afternoon, play the banjo in the evening, he will find himself in Sun City—or hell. Darwin will say that this is so because biological evolution has not prepared us, either physcially or temperamentally, for endless leisure and play.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu