Word: toil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When God foreclosed on Eden, he condemned Adam and Eve to go to work. Work has never recovered from that humiliation. From the beginning, the Lord's word said that work was something bad: a punishment, the great stone of mortality and toil laid upon a human spirit that might otherwise soar in the infinite, weightless playfulness of grace...
...idea of work-work as an ethic, an abstraction-arrived rather late in the history of toil. Whatever edifying and pietistic things may have been said about work over the centuries (Kahlil Gibran called work "love made visible," and the Benedictines say, "To work is to pray"), humankind has always tried to avoid it whenever possible. The philosophical swells of ancient Greece thought work was degrading; they kept an underclass to see to the laundry and other details of basic social maintenance. That prejudice against work persisted down the centuries in other aristocracies. It is supposed, however, to be inherently...
Deserving though the biologists may be, their new role raises a real concern. Traditionally, university researchers toil in their labs, usually at the taxpayers' expense, doing basic research?that is, research promising fresh insights into the fundamental truths of nature, regardless of the prospect of immediate payoffs. The bioengineering firms, by contrast, must set their sights on quick returns. Will the new alliance between industry and academia destroy the old objective "purity" of science? Will scientists still freely exchange information or lab specimens, as they have often done in the past, if they know a colleague works for a rival...
...what one must assume are Communist spies. It is only when Albin and Renato are forced to flee France and take refuge in Italy, at the home of the latter's mother, that the picture comes alive. For these are the backward boondocks, where women are expected to toil for their keep. Poor Albin, forced to live not a fantasy of femininity but one of its harsher realities, finds himself scrubbing floors and harvesting grain-all of which distinctly goes against his grain. He is also pursued by an inarticulate rustic type, who is apparently smitten by the hearty...
...kind, should make such demands. It's the proportions that give me the greatest trouble. And I have such a horror of grandiloquent finales." "To live without writing, oh marvel!" she added at another point. But when she was old and someone asked her why she continued to toil so diligently, she seemed shocked by the question. "It's my work," she replied...