what is in the work

from Andre Dubus, Finding a Girl in America (1980)

Typed on a sheet of paper, thumbtacked to the wall over his desk, was this from Heart of Darkness:

No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

A woman had to know that: simply know it, that was all. He did not need praise from her, he rarely liked to talk about his work, and he had no delusions about it: he liked most novels he read better than he liked his own. But the work was his, and its final quality did not matter so much as the hours it demanded from him. It made the passage of time concrete, measurable. It gave him confidence, not in the work itself, but in Hank Allison: after a morning at the desk, he had earned his day on earth. When he did not work, except by choice, he disliked himself. If these days occurred in succession because of school work, hangovers, lack of will, sickness, he lost touch with himself, felt vague and abstract, felt himself becoming whomever he was with.