John Stewart Collis | Gladsome Lights

The author of The Worm Forgives the Plough finds that hoeing is a fairly pleasurable sort of farm work, writing of it, “I have never since had a combination of similar qualities for softening the blows of monotony.” And yet…

This job, and the previous ones, brought me up against one of the fallacies concerning agricultural work held by the citizen of our mean cities. It is supposed that ‘on the land’ you have ‘time to think’, and that conditions are such that the mind can indulge quietly in wise expansive meditations in the open air. Certainly the place to think is the open air. But not during work.

To be able to think consecutively about anything you must concentrate, and there are few jobs on the land that you can do so automatically as to be free to really think. Perhaps hoeing should be one of these. For a short time it is. Then the body interferes with the mind. The back begins to ache. You become physically preoccupied. You become tired. And then the mind, instead of being able to concentrate upon something consecutively, indulges either in fatuous daydreams or nurses petty grievances or dwells upon the worst traits of one’s least pleasant friends.

At such times I have often been appalled at my mind and wondered if others could have such rotten ones. And if a Great Idea does descend, well, I stop working to take it in, and rest on my hoe, and look across the land (as a matter of fact, I don’t: I carefully gaze on the ground in case anyone is looking — for he who gazes towards the earth presents a less agriculturally reprehensible spectacle than he who looks toward heaven).

–John Stewart Collis in The Worm Forgives the Plough

Man-witha-hoe Millet — Jean-François Millet, Man With a Hoe

To support his country’s part in World War II John Stewart Collis worm asked to work in Britain’s Land Army. “Since it was clear to me that I would be given some home job for which I should be entirely unfitted, I asked to be excused in favor of agriculture.”

While he did quite a bit of forestry work as part of this commitment, The Worm Forgives the Plough is the book that tells of the subsequent farming experience, and that is what I am currently reading.

Though I am the daughter of a farmer, I think my only direct farming experience was to pick lemons a few times and drive a tractor a few yards at a time between the rows. Until I had my own patch of ground to become acquainted with after I married, I was somewhat like Collis, more linked to academia than to the earth.

It’s always a pleasure to find someone who is able to write, and who wants to write about farming. Reading him I am reminded of Victor Davis Hanson, another member of academia who is also a true farmer, and can articulate the practical matters and heart’s realities that perhaps most farmers just deal with, often silently. Coming “from outside” he also has a perspective slightly broader that can appreciate the humor and relate farm work to life in other parts of society.

Even though reading about the land and agricultural work will never replace actual participation in that process, I want to post some of my favorite passages from Collis as I vicariously join him on the farm. Here’s one:

I had only been working on the land a question of weeks, but one morning as I went past the potato field I realized with what fresh eyes I now could see a field, this field. It was no longer just a bit of earth the beauty of which I perceived from the outside. I saw it a hundred times more clearly, it was a hundred times more real. For I had sown it with potash and superphosphate. I had walked up and down it endlessly. I had counted the minutes nearer the midday meal, I had tried to plough it, I had put down potatoes in the furrows. Already I was no longer an onlooker, a spectator, excluded as if by excommunication from its factual and actual existence. I no longer hung in the void, but had entered in at the door of labour and become part of the world’s work in its humblest and yet proudest place.