Robert Frost’s poem Death of the Hired Man presents a sentimental, capitalist view of human worth. Its subject is a dying laborer who appears in his final hours at the farm of his former employers, a husband and wife, through whose conversation the case is put. The laborer, tempted away last summer to a different farm by an offer of wages in addition to room and board, returns “home,” ostensibly to resume his services. He is taken in out of compassion by the wife, who sets about to persuade her husband to shelter the man in his infirmity.<\/p>\n
The laborer is described as “worthless,” having “one accomplishment” (knowing how to build a load of hay), and “nothing to look back on with pride.” He is judged by a pair whose unquestioned right to pass sentence is based on property ownership and marriage. In the spare tones of evening, Frost presents through others’ eyes an extraordinary portrait of a man who, though anti-intellectual, is yet a thinking man, a man who cares for others, and who is proud of the skill of his labor. The laborer, Silas, has a banker brother, but never speaks of him. The wife explains, “Silas is what he is–we wouldn’t mind him–\/But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.\/ He never did a thing so very bad.\/ He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good \/ As anybody. Worthless though he is, \/ he won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.” “I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone,” her husband replies. Si’s thought in returning to the farm, told through the wife, was to teach a certain young college man, “the fool of books” but yet a “likely lad,” who had worked on the farm a previous summer, to build a load of hay.<\/p>\n
Silas’s predicament is more universal than it first appears. As soon as we are set upon by the ability to consider ourselves, we are bound to create a myth of our own significance. The impossibility of rationally establishing our personal significance, or even the significance of our species, results in all manner of nonsense, but to fail in this endeavor is devastating. We come each to hide behind the curtain, substituting a false image (or alternately an image of our progeny) as a wonderful wizard, or at least the worthy servant of one. Most of us being more or less embedded in a group made up of significant numbers of persons who more or less share a myth of significance obscures the easy realization of this human condition, but it exists nevertheless.<\/p>\n
To fail to develop or subscribe to a measure that, like Mary Poppins’ tape, putatively demonstrates empirically that we are “practically perfect” in at least a fair number of significant dimensions, is psychologically disastrous. This is not to promote modesty or self-loathing, which are practiced to such bizarre self-aggrandizement. It is only to say that to assert the relative worth of one’s own life in a competitive world of finite resources is necessary, and that to fail in the task is tantamount to suicide.<\/p>\n
The children’s classics referred to above play gently with measures of worth, showing that they are sometimes arbitrary, always heavily dependent on context, and usually self-serving. These stories are more subtle and convincing than the recent and absurd self-promotional stunt of a group of billionaires, persons having wealth so vast as to be infinite within the context of an individual life, who committed to give half their wealth to charity before or after their death as an example and encouragement of generosity.<\/p>\n
They do remind us that evaluation is at its root an imaginative function. As such, may we not assess creatively or intuitively, for no good reason at all? I find this persuasive, and, in fact, the only tenable approach to valuing life. However, I find that my fellows generally would rather be hated than to be loved for no good reason, and feel deprecated when loved for reasons other than their own. I wonder why this is so, and grieve for the lost opportunity to more universally affirm when not compelled by others’ nonsense. Perhaps they are wise and know, as John Kenneth Galbraith said, “It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Robert Frost’s poem Death of the Hired Man presents a sentimental, capitalist view of human worth. Its subject is a dying laborer who appears in his final hours at the farm of his former employers, a husband and wife, through … Continue reading