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39 I WORKMANSHIP Some hands go to the manicure To primp and polish and shine Some hands go to the velvet lure And some to the jewel shrine; But these are the hands that hold the plow The self-same hands as of old and now— They are the hands that court’sy and perk But these are the hands that do the work. —From “Hands,” Wind and Weather (New York: Scribner, 1916) Workmanship infuses the six quintessentially agrarian essays that follow : “My Father’s Hoe,” “The Honest Day’s Work,” “Nails,” “From Haying-Time to Radio,” “The Soil,” and “The Daily Fare.” Reminiscent of the essays of John Burroughs and Henry David Thoreau in both sentiment and subject, Bailey’s work is more autobiographical here than elsewhere, as he strongly ties his agrarianism and liberal-minded theology to his life story. In each piece, Bailey considers “handiness” and “handiwork,” paying tribute to the “gentle art of doing things yourself.” Implicit throughout is the notion that these “gentle arts” are “lost arts,” affording Bailey, the scientist, moments of unabashed nostalgia for bygone days when the worthiness of an enterprise was not measured in terms of cold, hard cash. Bailey’s yeoman sympathies cause him to question progress, scientific and otherwise, where progress, so-called, increases our helplessness or trends us toward profligacy. Throughout these pages, Bailey remains an optimist rather than a disgruntled Luddite and often, particularly when conjuring a long-ago boyhood, hints at a wry understanding of his own, nonscientific sentimentalities . “The Honest Day’s Work,” for example, elegizes the days before the time clock, the public works crew, and the overzealous labor union— regrettable fixtures in public life as Bailey sees them. By way of contrast, the author presents the independent, painstaking work of the plowman as an ever rarer, ever more valuable commodity. “The Daily Fare” likewise seeks the authentic, offering a contemporary-sounding critique of our food’s arti- ficiality and our habit of absent-minded consumption. Sounding uncannily like Wendell Berry, the author laments, “And so we all live mechanically, from shop to table, without contact, and irreverently.” ...

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