Covering The Distance
A long process of religious self-delusion
has been necessary
to pass from the myth of the birth of work
as God’s punishment for the original sin,
to the infamous slogan
covering the entrance to Nazi concentration camps,
‘Work will set you free.’
A process which covers the distance
between the origin of the French word for Work
— travail, from the Latin tripalium,
an instrument of torture to which
prisoners were bound and burned alive —
and the contemporary discourse
about ‘happiness at Work’,
as developed by many
global enterprises.
The meagerness of our salaries reminds us of such a distance……The violence of working poverty and semi-poverty, while utterly paralyzing if pushed to extreme, helps us rip the veils that often cover the martyrdom of a working life.
Excerpt, The Last Night by Fredrico Campagna p. 35
