{"id":213,"date":"2010-03-31T08:59:40","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T15:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=213"},"modified":"2011-07-11T12:16:03","modified_gmt":"2011-07-11T16:16:03","slug":"on-the-value-and-meaning-of-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=213","title":{"rendered":"On the Value and Meaning of Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading my friend Margaret Paxson\u2019s book, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village<\/em>. <\/a>Paxson, an anthropologist, watched, interviewed and listened to the villagers of Solovyovo for many months to learn how they related to each other, to their land and to the past.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, shortly before going to a dinner party with some other writers, I read a section on currency, debt and exchange.<\/p>\n

In a village where people grow their own vegetables, raise animals, keep bees, produce their own alcohol, fetch their own water, and build their own houses, it\u2019s fair to ask what the value of money is. In Solovyovo, one needs money to buy things like grain, heating fuel, radios, televisions, but cash is not the primary, purest or most \u201ccomfortable\u201d form of currency. Rather than pay one another in rubles, Solovyovo\u2019s villagers prefer to exchange meat for vodka, honey for cheese, or milk for a few hours of help in the potato field. Debts are settled through deeds and other goods. Money, as much as possible, doesn\u2019t enter the calculation.<\/p>\n

So, with my friend\u2019s description of this alternate economy in mind, I set off to my writers\u2019 dinner party.<\/p>\n

Over food and wine, shared our stories: we told what had brought us to writing, how we organized our workdays, and we outlined the decisions each of us had made to create room for writing in our lives. Finally, toward the end of the evening, the talk turned to finances and the concept of work. The discussion was sparked by the description of one author as a \u201cworking mother,\u201d when she practiced no profession other than writing. Was this a fair description of a woman who writes and raises kids, but who may not earn a whole heck of a lot?<\/p>\n

Several questions arose for me as a result of that discussion: Is writing only \u201creal\u201d or \u201cvaluable\u201d or even \u201cwork\u201d if it pays the rent? Should an author\u2019s work conditions be taken into consideration before we judge a piece of writing? Does it matter, in other words, whether a writer\u2019s life is tough or cushy? (Tolstoy was rich; Kafka was relatively poor. Should we care?) Is the sum of one\u2019s life\u2019s work measured only in dollars, or is there another currency we can use?<\/p>\n

What can the villagers of Solovyovo teach us in this regard?<\/p>\n

[Photo: napugal]<\/p>\n

\"Share<\/a>