Work by D. H. Lawrence

Work

There is no point in work

unless it absorbs you

like an absorbing game.

If it doesn’t absorb you

if it’s never any fun,

don’t do it.

When a man goes out into his work

he is alive like a tree in spring,

he is living, not merely working.

When the Hindus weave thin wool into long, long lengths

of stuff with their thin dark hands and their wide dark eyes and

their still souls absorbed

they are like slender trees putting forth leaves, a long

white web of living leaf, the tissue they weave,

and they clothe themselves in white as a tree clothes

itself in its own foliage.

As with cloth, so with house, ships, shoes, wagons or

cups or loaves, men might put them forth as a snail its shell, as a bird that

leans its breast against its nest, to make it round,

as the turnip models his round root, as the bush makes

flowers and gooseberries,

putting them forth, not manufacturing them,

and cities might be as once they were, bowers grown out

from the busy bodies of people.

And so it will be again, men will smash the machines.

And last, for the sake of clothing himself in his own

leaf-like cloth

tissued from his life,

and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a beaver’s

nibbled mansion

and drinking from cups that came off his fingers like

flowers off their five-fold stem,

he will cancel the machines we have got.

D. H. Lawrence