The industrial worker now has twentyhours of free time a week that his grandfather did not have.

This set of books is offered not merely as an object uponwhich leisure may be expended, but also as a means to thehumanization of work through understanding.16

Whatever work there is should have as much meaning aspossible. Wherever possible, workmen should be artists; theirwork should be the application of knowledge or science andknown and enjoyed by them as such. They should, if possi-ble, know what they are doing, why what they are doing hasthe results it has, why they are doing it, and what constitutesthe goodness of the things produced. They should understandwhat happens to what they produce, why it happens in thatway, and how to improve what happens. They should under-stand their relations to others co-operating in a given process,the relation of that process to other processes, the pattern of-them all as constituting the economy of the nation, and thebearing of the economy on the social, moral, and politicallife of the nation and the world. Work would be humanizedif understanding of all these kinds were in it and around it.

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away.

Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.”

Indeed, this act of orienting ourselves — to the moment, to the world, to our own selves — is perhaps the most elusive art of all, and our attempts to master it often leave us fumbling, frustrated, discombobulated. And yet therein lies our greatest capacity for growth and self-transcendence.