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Zachary Sachs · 23 August 2007

I am working on a short study of the narrative movement of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, but for now, an excerpt in which I find a corrolary to Chris’s post a few weeks ago:

Then I made a curious discovery about myself. However much I wished to do so I could not give up my work. I was astonished! To explain how this could be I must here have recourse to an analogy. I remembered it was the custom in England in the olden days to punish criminals condemned to hard labor by binding them on a wheel worked by water-power; thus compelling the victim to move his legs to a certain rhythm, as otherwise they would be broken. All work strikes me as having this compulsory character. The position remians the same whether one works or not; and I may say that [my employee] Olivi and I were both equally bound to the wheel, the only difference being that I did not have to move my legs. Of course the result was different, but I now know for a certainty that it deserved neither praise nor blame. The point really is whether one is bound to a wheel that is moving or standing still. The difficulty of freeing onself is the same in either case.

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