Manual Drive

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Work has changed obviously, inevitably, and so have our tools. The current Craftsman catalog offers a 1,197-piece professional tool set—including 311 wrenches, 72 screwdrivers, 415 sockets, 36 pliers—for roughly $5,000. And those are just the hand tools. Power tools in the same catalog include drills, drill pressers, edge banders, fasteners, finishers, sander/grinders, sander/polishers, buffers, power hammers, jigsaws, biscuit joiners, lathes, planers, routers, band saws, circular saws, miter saws, chop saws, radial saws, reciprocal saws, scroll saws, table saws, and precision laser levels to replace the plumb line on a string.

Such is progress. We are an affluent people, and our smorgasbord of specialized tools reflects that. More and more, we no longer even hold our tools: We push the wood through them, or we attach the wood to clamps and just stand back.

Bly mourns the decline of physical labor.

Thoreau grieves over the atrophy of our legs.

I am worried about our hands.

Most of us, it seems, don’t really use them anymore, not for anything solid. Not for our lives, our living. Not really. If I had the correct software, even this essay could have been dictated to my PC. Tomorrow’s tools are digital, invisible, hands-free.

But is that all our hands are really for? To hold things?

We still use our hands to speak, thank goodness, but I’m worried that they, like Thoreau’s brand of walking, like physical labor, are the next to go. Perhaps years from now, people will be rewarded for the stillness of their hands. It will be demanded of us.

One more corner of our souls will shut itself down.

My father used to work with his hands.

One August morning, I did, too. I grabbed a simple tool, attacked my problem.

Eventually, to my own genuine surprise, I managed to excavate a three-foot rim around the lilac, to find the thick ball where the roots began. A stump grinder might have done better in 10 minutes. But I managed to hack away at the solid tangle of buried wood until the lilac bush gave up, and the root ball popped out as easily as a long-loose tooth.

From Arts and Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture (Spring 2000). Subscriptions: $15/yr. (2 issues) from Campus Box 89, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, GA 31061. http://al.gcsu.edu.

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