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Quote by Angela Flournoy

“Build up her own life--how? How to build a life with no one, rooted to nothing but a house full of an old man's things? Desiree began devoting weekday mornings to scouring the internet for jobs. She learned what she had no interest in--hospitality, teaching, medicine--but what she might apply herself to remained as much a mystery as before Nolan died.”

Quote by Angela Flournoy

Work

The Wilderness

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Author

Angela Flournoy

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“Indeed, the most difficult part about becoming a professional is adopting the professional attitude and learning to be comfortable adhering to the given ideological framework, which some students find quite alien. When students fail to complete professional training programs, they almost always do so because they have problems adjusting their attitude, not because they are unable to learn the technical tricks of the trade. That is, people who drop out of school usually do so not because they lack the ability to go farther, but because they are consciously or unconsciously unwilling to become the type of person the system demands. The greater the adjustment an individual has to make to behave in the expected way, the less likely it is that that individual will do so.”

“If you are a professional, coming to understand the political nature of what you do, as part of an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional, can be liberating. It can help you recover your long-forgotten social goals and begin to pursue them immediately, giving your life greater meaning and eliminating a major source of stress. It can help you become a savvy player in the workplace and reclaim some lost autonomy. And, ironically, it can help you command greater respect from management and receive greater recognition and reward, without necessarily working harder.”

“Augustine’s acknowledgement toward the genius of the damned presages what only later becomes a hallmark of Catholic theology, the adage that grace perfects nature and does not destroy it. The futility of our natural powers only gains its requisite dignity with the order given to it by God, not by the arbitration of our fallen wills or a lust for death shared with lifeless machines. The bourgeois affinity for parochial labor and the polity’s need for mobilization both resound in the twilight of antiquity, when Augustine reads in Virgil’s Georgics the same poetic condescension and misplaced praise. Labor properly so called belongs to the free man and in fact makes a man free. Salvation, like work, both sets us free and enrolls us in the civic responsibility of a polity. Work, like salvation, enjoys both a metaphysical and an economic status.”