“But I’ll Know It’s There.”

On Friday night, I saw Toni Morrison speak with Hilton Als as part of The New Yorker Festival. I wish I could’ve held in my head every single part of their conversation, but the memory of their voices is enough.

One anecdote I do remember is Toni Morrison’s account of her first job, cleaning houses when she was 13 years old for two dollars a week. She gave one dollar to her mother and kept the other dollar — “for candy,” she explained. She wanted to quit because she thought her boss was mean, and her mother was like, Quit, sure, it’s just a job! Her father, on the other hand, told her to keep the job, to do the work and come home. “You don’t live there,” she remembers him saying, and she told us the thought crystallized something for her: she could go, do her work, and just…come home. That wasn’t where she lived.

Later, she told another story about her father and work. He was a welder, and one day he came home confessing he’d been so proud of welding a “perfect seam” that he had carved in his initials. “But no one will see it!” she said, and he just replied, “But I’ll know it’s there.”

Those two stories together were so perfect, I thought, because they really show the kind of push and pull between identifying with your work and taking pleasure in it. Taking pleasure in a job well done is something you do because the work becomes a reflection of you; identifying too strongly with your job, until you’re no longer sure where the job ends and you begin, turns you into a mirror for the job. It is, like every other part of being an adult that you discover is simultaneously amazing and awful, a balance.