Marooned Off Vesta

a week ago:

The laborer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on – is this 12 hours’ weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours’ work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed.

You are wrong to run down your own work. We are not literati. If we take such dire pains, it is not for the result but because that is the only way to keep going on this wretched planet. […] Maybe you have lost it a bit, but it will come back and leave you once again not giving a tinker’s curse for any of these questions of value. I think that all this business about prizes and other perks has done you no good whatever. […] We shall never any of us know what we are worth, and it is the last question we should be asking.

So I’m just saying. I put this in my queue yesterday and today I was offered a raise that is literally life-changing, $10,000 more a year than I’m making now.