Balancing Physical Work With Intellectual Work
David Grene:
When I was on either of the two farms, I was incessantly and delightfully busy milking, feeding the animals, learning the ways of grass and grazing. Ireland generally is a great grazing country to such a degree that I have very often heard farmers say that the worst thing you ever did was to turn the ground upside down on the furrow slice. Every day’s occupation was a new occasion for happiness. I still read as I did in Dublin, but, of course, for shorter periods and fewer books. But in those days of long ago, I already began to find that the one pursuit balanced the other. My joy in books and the way I learned were enhanced by the work of the farm and vice versa. I have found that confirmed and strengthened in the years since. It is perhaps not very good for one to spend one’s time working incessantly physically, but it emphatically is most risky for someone to live off thoughts, expressing them and writing them down, with no ballast in manual work.
Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir, p. 10f