The fact is that for almost all men the major part of life consists of obligatory occupations, chores which they would never do out of choice. Since this fate is so ancient and so constant, it would seem that man should have learned to adapt himself to it and consequently to find it charming. But he does not seem to have done so. Although the constancy of the annoyance has hardened us a little, these occupations imposed by necessity continue to be difficult. They weigh upon our existence, mangling it, crushing it. In English such tasks are called "jobs"; in the Romance languages the terms for them derive from the Latin word trepalitum, which originally meant a terrible torture. And what most torments us about work is that by filling up our time it seems to take it from us; in other words, life used for work does not seem to us to be really ours, which it should be, but on the contrary seems the annihilation of our real existence. We try to encourage ourselves with secondary reflections that attempt to ennoble work in our eyes and to construct for it a kind of hagiographic legend, [1] but deep down inside of us there is something irrepressible always functioning, which never abandons protest and which confirms the terrible curse of Genesis. [2] Hence the bad feeling we usually inject into the term "occupation." When someone tells us that he is "very occupied" he is usually giving us to understand that his real life is being held in suspension, as if foreign realities had invaded his world and left him without a home. This is true to such an extent that the man who works does so with the more or less vague hope of one day winning through work the liberation of his life, of being able in time to stop working and... to start really living. [pp.24-25]
Argue, fight as much as you like, over who should be the privileged ones, but do not pretend that squares are round and that hunting is not a privilege. What happens here is just what has happened with many other things. For two hundred years Western man has been fighting to eliminate privilege, which is stupid, because in certain orders privilege is inevitable and its existence does not depend on human will. It is to be hoped that the West will dedicate the next two centuries to fighting—there is no hope for a suspension of its innate pugnacity—to fighting, I say, for something less stupid, more attainable, and not at all extraordinary, such as a better selection of privileged persons.
In periods of an opposite nature, which were not revolutionary and in which, avoiding false utopias, people relied on things as they really were, not only was hunting a privilege respected by all, but those on the bottom demanded it of those on top, because they saw in hunt-ing, especially in its superior forms—the chase, falconry, and the battue [3]—a vigorous discipline and an opportunity to show courage, endurance, and skill, which are the attributes of the genuinely powerful person. Once a crown prince who had grown up in Rome went to occupy the Persian throne. Very soon he had to abdicate because the Persians could not accept a monarch who did not like hunting, a traditional and almost titular occupation of Persian gentlemen. The young man, apparently, had become interested in literature and was beyond hope. [pp.30-31]
Notes:
[1] The consecration of work, its positive interpretation, was one of the great new themes characteristic of the Renaissance, on which even the greatest antagonists—for example, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Luther—are agreed. Work has been the "modern" virtue par excellence, the bourgeois virtue.
[2] "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" (Genesis 3:19).—Trans.
[3] Practice of beating woods to drive the game from cover.—Trans.
* Reprinted from Meditations on Hunting by José Ortega y Gasset, translated by Howard B. Wescott, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1985
