Virtual is real

Posted on | July 11, 2005

One part of the weekend was devoted to my computer. For two years, I let it get on with itself, downloading useless programs, hidden indexes. It was time to get real and the arrival of ‘Tiger’, was a good excuse to get on with this impossible exercise (yes, of course, I have a Macintosh, obviously :)).

OK, my experiences with computers are not the subject of this blog, this is just another way of saying that in carrying out a little maintenance I tumbled across an extraordinary piece of writing by Simone Weil that I had put to one side four or five years ago. No, not the living, estimable individual, the other, unknown. A gifted child, dazzling intelligence, short life, Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) is a scarcely known author brought to my attention by my friend Marc Parcè.

I give you this piece, such as it is, written in London in 1943 after a period of manual labour on a farm.

«Man who produced our civilization is only interested in abstractions. He likes humanity because it costs nothing to like a Javanese, but he hates his neighbour and won’t do anything to be agreeable because, in this last instance, it’s a question of a living relationship: one leaves behind abstraction; one must exert oneself and it is precisely this effort which our civilizations no longer teach. One demands that the State is a substitute for everything, giving insurance for every kind of happenstance in life such that one no longer has to predict anything oneself, nor rectify anything, and one lives without anxiety from birth until death.

But who sees that man would lose all his vitality by virtue of no longer struggling, that he would be full of empty virtues, that he would be anaemic, asleep, because he makes no effort and and it is this which, in an instinctive manner, makes one look for a remedy in nature.

But she has her rules. One must play the game, without cheating. With her, there are no abstractions. One is in direct contact with reality. There, one must weed, prune, water; protect - against inclement weather, the sun, the wind, bacteria, insects, certain animals and even men themselves.

One must deploy the resources of one’s hands or one’s intelligence against concrete examples. One is in a permanent defense against any harm which awaits one and also on the offensive for the good one wants to do. One is not sheltered by general formulas. Each case requires its own solution, one must rediscover lost instincts, above all count upon oneself, become strong… firstly for oneself: that’s the nature of the beast, and for others too: that’s man!

It is easy to define the place which physical work must occupy in a well-ordered social life. It must be at the centre of spiritual existence.»

Early in the morning, after returning at two o’clock from de-budding and de-leafing with the work team in green, aching back but the spirit soothed, these words touched me. Why does one talk so little of the ‘physical’ difficulty of the work of a ‘vigneron’. Of the earth, so basic? Of the sun, so burning? The wind, so cutting? Why do ‘vignerons’ always complain about sales, depressions, administrative restrictions, users, and instead suffer in silence the painful muscles, spoilt hands, spinal pains, the spirit which wants to get on, moved by the passion and urgency of the task, and the body which, all too often, just refuses?

This morning, I talk of this with pride. Manual work brings peace to the spirit. Whatever others may say, to work with other human beings is, at least for me, one of the greatest pleasures of my job as a ‘vigneron’.

Hervè Bizeul

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