激情晨读英语美文 第一章 人生如诗:工作、劳作和娱乐

听力课堂 www.tingclass.net
Work, Labor, and Play
By Wystan Hugh Auden
So far as I know, Miss Hannah Arendt was
the first person to define the essential difference
between work and labor. To be happy, a man must feel,
firstly, free and, secondly, important. He cannot
be really happy if he is compelled by society to do
what he does not enjoy doing, or if what he enjoys doing
is ignored by society as of no value or importance.
In a society where slavery in the strict sense
has been abolished, the sign that what a man does
is of social value is that he is paid money to do it,
but a laborer today can rightly be called a wage slave.
A man is a laborer if the job society offers him is
of no interest to himself but he is compelled to
take it by the necessity of earning a living
and supporting his family.The antithesis to labor is play.
When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing,
otherwise we should not play it, but it is
a purely private activity; society could not care less
whether we play it or not.Between labor and play stands work.
A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job
which society pays him to do; what from the point of view of society
is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play.
Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends,
not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual
who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example,
coincide with the difference between a manual and mental job;
a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.
Which a man is can be seen from his attitude toward leisure.
To a worker, leisure means simply the hours he needs
to relax and rest in order to work efficiently.
He is therefore more likely to take too little leisure
than too much; workers die of coronaries and forget
their wives’ birthdays. To the laborer, on the other hand,
leisure means freedom from compulsion, so that it is natural
for him to imagine that the fewer hours he has to spend laboring,
and the more hours he is free to play, the better.