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I work in two organic gardens. I get paid $10 per hour. It's hard work. I can't say that I really like this kind of work very much.
If I was a successful writer, I would not be doing this hard labor.
If I was a successful writer, I would have a modest income from that work, from the sale of my books, and from my weekly column in a national publication.
I would do some gardening work, but only as a volunteer, only for my own pleasure and good health, not for money. Oh, that would be wonderful.
If I was a successful writer, I would have an office or study dedicated to writing -- with a desk and chair and good lamp, with an ample shelf of books, with a semi-easy chair for reading. A place to work. A place that was mine. And that would be wonderful too.
If I was a successful writer, I would be going to Los Angeles every month -- to have lunch with my editor, or to give a reading at some club or college.
It seems like no more than an idle day dream, and that I must toil in the garden and earn my living by the sweat of my brow all the days of my life. Such longing and lamentations!
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I work in two organic gardens. I get paid $10 per hour. It's hard work. I can't say that I really like this kind of work very much.
If I was a successful writer, I would not be doing this hard labor.
If I was a successful writer, I would have a modest income from that work, from the sale of my books, and from my weekly column in a national publication.
I would do some gardening work, but only as a volunteer, only for my own pleasure and good health, not for money. Oh, that would be wonderful.
If I was a successful writer, I would have an office or study dedicated to writing -- with a desk and chair and good lamp, with an ample shelf of books, with a semi-easy chair for reading. A place to work. A place that was mine. And that would be wonderful too.
If I was a successful writer, I would be going to Los Angeles every month -- to have lunch with my editor, or to give a reading at some club or college.
It seems like no more than an idle day dream, and that I must toil in the garden and earn my living by the sweat of my brow all the days of my life. Such longing and lamentations!
Even if it was an oversight, I love the fact that you titled this post "Sucess." Calls to mind two of my favorite quotations; the first from William James,the second from Thomas Merton. "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess 'Success.' That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease." I recommend the James' webpage at http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/james.html "Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets of Success." He replied: "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and
ReplyDeleteform, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."" Merton overstates the case but it's a great use of hyperbole - especially from a revered Catholic priest. I've put together a useful Merton page at http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html