Today is Labor Day in the US--a day that is all but bereft of all meaning --here is a good essay to reflect on this day and what it should mean: On a Saturday afternoon in October I reread Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis. The main character, Gregor Samsa, is a traveling salesman who lives at home with his parents and his younger sister, has a picture of a fur model on his bedroom wall that he framed himself, and thinks only about work — no surprise, then, that he is transformed into a “monstrous vermin.” I thought, if you spend your entire life committed only to doing work you don’t care about and have no life of your own, you may as well be a giant dung beetle. I expected my students to see the ways that work can dehumanize us. I marked a few passages to focus on in class.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 16:24:07 +0000
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