“I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people. It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.” -- Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, oral historian, and radio broadcaster Louis "Studs" Terkel, from his 1974 book "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do," which compiled accounts of actual people's daily work from farm workers to truck drivers to bank tellers.
Terkel, who was born 109 years ago today, had a legendary weekday radio program which ran on Chicago's WFMT from 1952 to 1997, where he interviewed am incredible range of people, including Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bertrand Russell. That's quite a "working" life Studs had.
(photo: Terkel, with the Chicago skyline behind him. Bettmann / CORBIS)
2 comments:
He has a point. A human does not live by paychecks alone. But the thing that gives life meaning and the thing that earns money don't necessarily need to be the same thing. My own line of work is far from profound or lofty in significance (accounting), but I've found other things that make a meaningful life. Sometimes, if you do what you love but do it for a boss, you find that doing it for a boss crushes all the joy out of it.
Infidel -- It's uncommon that you find a person who loves their job. For most, it's a means to an end, the end being something you love doing and the means to pay for it. "Job" has come to reflect something you have to do ("it's a job") and not a calling or joy. Studs was a fascinating guy.
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