How great it was to read this, by Charles Péguy, about work. It’s such a new perspective today, and yet so ancient. It is so, just like that. Because my dad and my mom passed the same thing on to me. Because their parents, my grandparents, passed the same thing on to them.

I read it just today, Sunday. You can’t start the week, begin Monday, without a renewed enthusiasm.

Believe it or not, we were raised in the bosom of a joyful people.

Believe it or not, it’s all the same, we have known workers who wanted to work. We have known workers who, upon waking, thought only of work. They would get up in the morning —and at that hour— singing at the thought of going to work. And they sang at eleven, when they were getting ready to eat their soup. In work lay their joy and the deep root of their being. And the very reason for their life.

We have known that cult of work well done, pursued and cultivated to the extreme scruple. I have seen, throughout my entire childhood, chairs being straw-seated with the very same spirit, and with the same heart, with which that people had carved their own cathedrals.

There was a time when workers were not servants. They worked. They cultivated an honor, absolute, as befits an honor. The leg of a chair had to be well made. It was natural, it was understood. It was a priority. It didn’t need to be well made for the salary, or in proportion to the salary. It didn’t need to be well made for the boss, nor for the connoisseurs, nor for the boss’s clients. It had to be well made in and of itself, in itself, in its very nature. A tradition arrived, sprung from the depths of the race, a history, an absolute, an honor demanded that that chair leg be well made. And every part of the chair that could not be seen was worked with the same perfection as the parts that could be seen. Following the same principle as the cathedrals. It was not about being seen or not being seen. It was the work itself that had to be well done.

Every thing, from the moment of waking, was a rhythm and a ritual and a ceremony. Every deed was an event; consecrated. Every thing was a tradition, a teaching; all things had their inner connection, constituting the holiest of customs. Everything was an inner rising, and a prayer, all day long: sleep and waking, work and measured rest, the bed and the table, the soup and the beef, the house and the garden, the door and the path, the courtyard and the staircase and the vessels upon the table.

They would say jokingly, and to tease their priests, that to work is to pray, and they did not know how right they were. To such a degree was work a prayer. And the factory an oratory.