The secret of the human condition is that there is no equilibrium between man and the surrounding forces of nature that infinitely surpass him in inaction; there is equilibrium only in action, by which man recreates his own life through work. The greatness of man is always to recreate his life. To recreate what is given to him. To forge the very thing he undergoes. Through work, he produces his own natural existence. Through science, he recreates the universe by means of symbols. Through art, he recreates the alliance between his body and his soul (cf. the discourse of Eupalinos). Note that each of these three things is something poor, empty, and vain, taken in itself and apart from its relation to the other two. Union of the three: working-class culture (you can always wait for that)... Plato himself is only a precursor. The Greeks knew art and sport, but not work. The master is the slave of the slave in the sense that the slave produces the master. Two tasks: to individualize the machine. To individualize science (popularization, a people's university in Socratic form concerning the foundations of trades). Manual labor. Why has there never been a worker or peasant mystic who wrote about the use of the disgust of work? This disgust, which is so often there, always threatening -- the soul flees from it and seeks to hide it from itself by a vegetative reaction. There is a danger of death in admitting it to oneself. Such is the source of the lie peculiar to working-class milieus. (There is a lie peculiar to every level.) This disgust is the burden of time. To admit it to oneself without yielding to it is to ascend. Disgust in all its forms is one of the most precious miseries given to man as a ladder for ascending. I have a very large share in this favor. To turn all disgust into disgust with oneself... Monotony is what is most beautiful or most dreadful. Most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity. Most dreadful if it is the sign of a perpetuity without change. Time transcended or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of beautiful monotony; pendulum oscillation, of dreadful monotony. Spirituality of work. Work makes one experience in an exhausting way the phenomenon of finality bounced back like a ball: working in order to eat, eating in order to work... If one regards one or the other as an end, or both taken separately, one is lost. The cycle contains the truth. A squirrel turning in its cage, and the rotation of the celestial sphere. Extreme wretchedness and extreme greatness. It is when man sees himself as a squirrel turning in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.
The great pain of manual labor is that one is compelled to exert effort for such long hours simply in order to exist. The slave is he for whom no good is proposed as the aim of his toils, except mere existence. He must then either be detached or fall to the vegetative level. No earthly finality separates workers from God. They alone are in this situation. All other conditions imply particular ends that form a screen between man and the pure good. For them, no such screen exists. They do not have something extra of which they must strip themselves. To make effort out of necessity and not for a good -- pushed, not drawn -- in order to maintain one's existence as it is -- that is always servitude. In this sense, the servitude of manual workers is irreducible. Effort without finality. This is terrible -- or more beautiful than anything -- if it is finality without end. The beautiful alone allows one to be satisfied with what is. Workers need poetry more than bread. They need their life to be a poetry. They need a light of eternity. Only religion can be the source of this poetry. It is not religion, it is revolution that is the opium of the people.
The deprivation of this poetry explains every form of demoralization.
Slavery is work without the light of eternity, without poetry, without religion.
Let the eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a fullness that dispenses with the search for such a reason.
Failing that, the only incentives are constraint and gain. Constraint, which implies the oppression of the people. Gain, which implies the corruption of the people.
Manual labor. Time entering the body. Through work, man makes himself matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist. Work is like a death.
One must pass through death. One must be killed, must undergo the gravity of the world. The universe weighing on the back of a human being -- what wonder that it hurts?
Work is like a death if it is without incentive. To act while renouncing the fruits of action.
To work -- if one is exhausted, it is to become subject to time like matter. Thought is compelled to pass from one instant to the next without clinging to the past or the future. That is obedience.
Joys parallel to fatigue. Sensory joys. Eating, resting, the pleasures of Sunday... But not money.
No poetry concerning the people is authentic if fatigue is not present in it, and the hunger and thirst born of fatigue.