Pierre Auguste Renoir on the price of not enjoying one’s work

    Pierre Auguste Renoir drew no distinction between factory workers and galley slaves. Here he relates what a furniture worker said to him:

Monsieur, for thirty years I’ve made the legs of chairs, another makes the backs, another assembles them, but I’m incapable of making a whole chair. There’s the whole secret. A man who can no longer enjoy his work loses all trace of taste. He becomes like the machine which drives him. He slaves away without imagination and without brains. He earns his living but without joy, and that’s what they call progress. Slavery has been abolished but the factory has been created. The slave doesn’t exist any more, but there’s the galley slave who sweats away in front of a machine which brutalizes and slowly kills him. I remember from my youth the lumbermen who sang while cutting their planks. Go and visit a mechanized sawmill and see if you hear laughter and singing. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 251.)
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    For a brief biography of Pierre Auguste Renoir, click here.