The Manual Blessing by Gelett Burgess — Read

Surely if there is one sharp, active sensation that, in this changeful life of ours, we never tire of, never outgrow, it is in the satisfaction of creative manual work. There is a conservation of pleasure as there is a conservation of energy, and our taste is being continually transmuted and evolved. One by one we outlive the joys of youth, the delights of physical exercise, the zest of travel, the beatitude of emotion, the singing raptures of love, passing from each to a more mature appeal, a more refined appetite, a subtler demand of the intellect or of the spirit. The familiar games lose their savour, the dance gives way to the drama, travel to the calmer investigation of homely miracles. We tire of seeing and begin to read, feasting peacefully at the banquet of the arts that other men have spread. This is, for many of us, what age means -- a giving up of active for passive pleasures when the old games lose their charm.

But the joy of creation does not fade, for in that lies our divinity and our claim to eternity. Each new product arouses the same thrill, the same spiritual excitement, the same pride of victory, and yet, strangely enough, though we think we work only for the final notch of accomplishment, it is not the completion but the construction that holds us entranced. Not the last stroke, but every stroke brings victory! It is like the climbing of a mountain. Do we endure the toil merely for the sake of the view at the summit? No, but for the primitive passion of conflict, the inch-by-inch fight against odds, the heaping of endeavour on endeavour, the continual measuring of what has been done with what remains to do. The finishing climax is but the exclamation point at the end of the sentence -- most of the sensation has been used up before we come to the full stop, and that point serves but to sum up our emotion in a visible emblem of success.