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Read our complete notes on the essay “Work” by John Ruskin. Our notes cover this essay’s summary and detailed analysis.

Work by John Ruskin Summary

Ruskin delivered his lecture “Work” before the working men’s institute, at Camber well. In this speech he addresses the working people there at the institution of working men. This speech is a socio-economic criticism on the contemporary life of England. In the very beginning of his speech he tries to bring forward all the harsh realities and destruction of industrial revolution in the life of working class.

He talks about the class distinction caused by this industrial revolution. Ruskin takes up some glaring issues of poor people. He doesn’t care for that society in which the poor end up noticeably poorer and the rich wealthier. The upper class enjoy by making poor people work for them and to accommodate them. So far as poor working people concern there is no contrast between male ruler of ancient time and modern aristocratic class. He develops several analogies to differentiate between idle men and working men, upper class and lower class.

He tries to make distinction between idle poor and idle rich, busy poor and busy rich. He says that there are many beggars, they are as lazy as they have ten thousand a years and many there are rich men as busier than their servants. Here he gives few recommendations for healthy society as he says if rich idle people observed and admonished the idle rich people, all would be correct. If the busy deprived people took notice and reprimanded idle poor, all would be okay.

But unfortunately these classes only look for the faults of other class. Only the depraved poor consider rich as their enemy and want to sack their houses, divide their wealth. Only the dissolute rich people use disgusting language of the wrong doings and follies of the poor people. Here he criticizes the industrious people and points out the tremendous existing distinction among industrious people; the distinction of low and high, lost and won etc. Ruskin draws distinctions between the two classes in four major respective.

• work and play
• poor and rich
• work by hand and brain
• wise work and foolish work

Here he defines the work and play. He says that play is a physical and mental effort, which has no resolute end, self pleasing. On the other hand work is something which has determined end and to earn benefit. He criticizes some of the famous plays of London as cricket, snooker and calls them a game of money making but useless money. He says that it’s like the runs of cricket has no use.

He says London is a city of play, very hard and unpleasant play. He places shooting and hunting in the category of game; costly and expensive game. He says that those who earn money by these games are earning money blindly. They do not know why they earn money and what they will do of it. As hunting is a game for gentlemen’s for women we have ladies’ game of expensive dressing. He gives the example of a brooch at jeweler’s shop ago; cost of 3000 pound. He criticizes the costly dressing of English, French and Russian men and women. While on the other hand poor people have no proper dress to wear. And he says this is the first distinction between upper and lower.

For his second distinction between poor and rich, between upper class money donors(Dives) and lower class money acceptors; beggar (Lazarus), he compares two articles from newspaper to illustrate this distinction. He reads the first article which is about the lavishness of a rich Russian at Paris. He spends fifteen franc only for two peaches. Another article is about the dead man beside a dung heap. The Thames police constable finds a dead body of an aged man beside the heap of dung in Shadwell Gap. The cadaver was of a bone picker. He was extremely poor. The inspector finds some bones and a penny in his pocket. Then he goes on talking about the lawful and unlawful bases of wealth.

The lawful basis of wealth is that the working man should be paid the handful value of his work and should be given a complete liberty over his possession. If today he does not spend the day after he will spend it. The lazy people who do not work but stay at home only breaking bread in the end will be doubly poor with nothing in possession.

Next, Ruskin talks about the false basis of distinction. He says such people who earn money on false basis are poor, uneducated, coward and inferior in intellect. Their only purpose is to make money nothing else. He defines the false basis of wealth as those who prefers money than their duties.

Ruskin says that the primary objectives of a soldier are to fight and win battle. The duty of a clergyman is to baptize and preach as the doctor purpose is to cure patient. If they prefer money than their work this is false basis of accumulation wealth. This is a huge distinction and can be compared the distinction between heaven and hell, between life and death for there are no two masters can be served.

He compares the duty the first lord as God and fee the second master as devil. If you prefer first you are servant of God and if fee first you are the devil’s servant. The next he says such kind of Satan’s servant to be found in every nation, who has making money, is principle objective of their life. They are very mean and stupid people.

To explain this stupidity he tells about a biblical reference of Judas Iscariot. He was a money lover and like all money lover he deceived Jesus Christ and did not understand him. In modern time there many Judas’s bargainers who are fee-first men. The modern capitalists are violating the rights of working class. They take all the production themselves, except laborer’s food and that is modern Judas’s way of betraying others.

The next he talks about the power of capital and the disadvantages of capital in first priority. He says that when the principle object of life becomes the fee or capital of any nation or man, “it is both got ill and spent ill”; and it does hurt in spending and getting both. When money becomes the principle object of life it becomes a curse for the man and nation.

Next, Ruskin talks about the work by hand and work by head. Both types of work are important and necessary for the maintenance of life. Everyone should be honest to his work. Rough work can be done by rough men and gentle work can be done by gentle people. The same men cannot do both work at a time. He tells the working men a grand proverb of Sancho’s that nothing is achieved by empty promises or flattery. Both class of working should respect each other work because a man setting in a room with all facilities does have no idea about the work of a man sitting in front of furnace or a driver driving against the wind.

But the problem is that the rough work is real and honest and though generally no useful but the gentle work accompanies deceit and cheating. When both works are equally done with honesty then head’s work is honorable than hand’s work. All work should be done with orderly manner, lawful way and human way not in the doggish way or disorderly. He criticizes the war and recruitment of war once again. We enlist people for labor that kills. We should enlist people for labor that feed. Then he talks about justice in great detail. He emphasizes on justice between people, between working class in every action of life.

In the fourth section of his speech he talks about the wise work and foolish work. Here tries to differentiate between sensible work and non-sensible work in daily occupation. In bold words he says that wise work is that which is done for and work with God. But on the other hand the work which is against God is foolish work. Work with God means to enforce God’s law of order and ensure justice. Order and justice are two great human deeds; there are two deeds against that are devil’s inequity and devil’s disorder.

A sensible human must fight against these two Satan’s deeds. So far if a person does not fight against means work for him. All wise works can be described by threefold in character. The very first character of wise work is HONEST. Honesty is very much important aspect of wise work. Ruskin implores to the working men to be honest with their work. He says that without honesty we will not be able to do anything for you and you yourself will fail also to do anything for yourself. All things are vain without honesty. So you must put your heart together. Put your hand in hand and you will win at all.

The second attribute of wise work is USEFUL. Wise work is useful. There must be something in the end of your hard work if nothing comes this is hardest. If all your bees business turns to spiders; this is the unkind result for the worker. It would be the greatest waste for a worker if he commits the waste of his labor.

The next of wise work is CHEERFUL. It is as cheerful as child’s work. He says that God’s kingdom is not to come outside but it lies inside of our hearts. It is within us. If we want to enter into the kingdom of God or bring it into our life we must adopt the character of children. If we want our work to be cheerful we must adopt child’s character. These characters of children we want.

The first character of a child is that it is Modest. Modest child does not think that it knows everything, always ask question, and wants to know more. Well like the child the first character of a wise and good workman is that he knows very little ask questions and tries to learn more and more. The second important character of a child and wise workman is to be faithful. A good child always perceives that his father knows better what is best for it. it trust him wholly, and this is the genuine characteristic of good and wise working man in any field. They must be faithful to their captains. The third one character of a good child is to be loving and generous. All these characters of a good child is the characters of good and great workers.

Work by John Ruskin Literary Analysis

The recent essay Work is one from the speeches of Ruskin’s book “Crown of wild olive”. He delivers this speech to workingmen in the working institution at Camberwell.

The essay is the socio-economic criticism of European industrialization and outcome of the industrialization.  This essay shows Ruskin’s rage against the machine and it dehumanization in an industrial era. When machines were invented and factories and industries were established there was no value for workers working by hand. This industrialization created a competition among industrial people.

Ruskin gives value to product by hand and he says the thing created without toil is worthless and “Machine ornaments are no ornaments at all”. The industrialization of Europe created class distinctions among people. Here Ruskin talks about to eliminate this class differences by the justice and honesty with the work.

More From John Ruskin

An Essay on Man

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Summary and Study Guide

Alexander Pope is the author of “An Essay on Man,” published in 1734. Pope was an English poet of the Augustan Age, the literary era in the first half of the 18th century in England (1700-1740s). Neoclassicism, a literary movement in which writers and poets sought inspiration from the works of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, influenced the poem. Writing in heroic couplets, Pope explores the connection between God, human nature , and society. The poem is philosophical and discusses order, reason, and balance, themes that dominated the era. Pope dedicated the poem to Henry St. John, one of his close friends and a famous Tory politician.

This is Pope’s final long poem. It was intended to be the first part of a book-length poem on his philosophy of the world, but Pope did not live to complete the book. Pope initially published “An Essay on Man” anonymously, as he had a fractious relationship with critics and wanted to see how people would respond to the work if unaware that he had written it. The work was praised highly when it was published, and is still esteemed as one of the most elegant didactic poems ever composed.

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Poet Biography

Alexander Pope was born in 1688 in London, England. His father was a wealthy merchant, but because he was Catholic and the Church of England was extremely anti-Catholic, his family could not live within ten miles of London, and Pope could not receive a formal education. As a result, Pope grew up near Windsor Forest and was self-taught. At the age of 12, he contracted spinal tuberculosis, which resulted in lifelong debilitating pain. He grew to be four and a half feet tall and was dependent on others.

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Despite these early challenges, Pope’s poetic talent enabled him to attain a higher social status. He began publishing poetry at the age of 16. He translated Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey , as well as the works of Shakespeare, and sold the translations for a subscription fee. From the profits of these translations, Pope purchased a grand mansion and large plot of land in Twickenham in 1719. Pope is famous for being the first poet able to support himself entirely on his writing. He valued his friendships, which were with some of the greatest minds of his time, including Jonathan Swift, the famous satirist and author of A Modest Proposal .  Pope also had many enemies due to his biting wit and talent for mocking the conventions of his era. For this, he was called “The Wasp of Twickenham.” His Essay on Criticism (1711) expressed his views on criticism and poetry. His mock-epic poem, The Rape of the Lock (1714), was one of his most famous satirical poems. His satire , The Dunciad (1728) lambasted the culture and literature of his day.

He died in 1744 at the age of 56 from edema and asthma. He never married and had no children. Pope is considered one of the greatest English poets of the 18th century and his style defined the Augustan age of poetry. After Shakespeare, he is the second most quoted writer in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations .

Pope, Alexander. “ An Essay on Man .” 2007. Project Gutenberg .

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François Voltaire

• Literature Notes
• Alexander Pope's Essay on Man
• Book Summary
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Chapters II-III
• Chapters IV-VI
• Chapters VII-X
• Chapters XI-XII
• Chapters XIII-XVI
• Chapters XVII-XVIII
• Chapter IXX
• Chapters XX-XXIII
• Chapters XXIV-XXVI
• Chapters XXVII-XXX
• Francois Voltaire Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Philosophy of Leibnitz
• Poème Sur Le Désastre De Lisoonne
• Other Sources of Influence
• Structure and Style
• Satire and Irony
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

The work that more than any other popularized the optimistic philosophy, not only in England but throughout Europe, was Alexander Pope's  Essay on Man  (1733-34), a rationalistic effort to justify the ways of God to man philosophically. As has been stated in the introduction, Voltaire had become well acquainted with the English poet during his stay of more than two years in England, and the two had corresponded with each other with a fair degree of regularity when Voltaire returned to the Continent.

Voltaire could have been called a fervent admirer of Pope. He hailed the Essay of Criticism as superior to Horace, and he described the Rape of the Lock as better than Lutrin. When the Essay on Man was published, Voltaire sent a copy to the Norman abbot Du Resnol and may possibly have helped the abbot prepare the first French translation, which was so well received. The very title of his Discours en vers sur l'homme (1738) indicates the extent Voltaire was influenced by Pope. It has been pointed out that at times, he does little more than echo the same thoughts expressed by the English poet. Even as late as 1756, the year in which he published his poem on the destruction of Lisbon, he lauded the author of Essay on Man. In the edition of Lettres philosophiques published in that year, he wrote: "The Essay on Man appears to me to be the most beautiful didactic poem, the most useful, the most sublime that has ever been composed in any language." Perhaps this is no more than another illustration of how Voltaire could vacillate in his attitude as he struggled with the problems posed by the optimistic philosophy in its relation to actual experience. For in the Lisbon poem and in Candide , he picked up Pope's recurring phrase "Whatever is, is right" and made mockery of it: "Tout est bien" in a world filled with misery!

Pope denied that he was indebted to Leibnitz for the ideas that inform his poem, and his word may be accepted. Those ideas were first set forth in England by Anthony Ashley Cowper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1731). They pervade all his works but especially the Moralist. Indeed, several lines in the Essay on Man, particularly in the first Epistle, are simply statements from the Moralist done in verse. Although the question is unsettled and probably will remain so, it is generally believed that Pope was indoctrinated by having read the letters that were prepared for him by Bolingbroke and that provided an exegesis of Shaftesbury's philosophy. The main tenet of this system of natural theology was that one God, all-wise and all-merciful, governed the world providentially for the best. Most important for Shaftesbury was the principle of Harmony and Balance, which he based not on reason but on the general ground of good taste. Believing that God's most characteristic attribute was benevolence, Shaftesbury provided an emphatic endorsement of providentialism.

Following are the major ideas in Essay on Man: (1) a God of infinite wisdom exists; (2) He created a world that is the best of all possible ones; (3) the plenum, or all-embracing whole of the universe, is real and hierarchical; (4) authentic good is that of the whole, not of isolated parts; (5) self-love and social love both motivate humans' conduct; (6) virtue is attainable; (7) "One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." Partial evil, according to Pope, contributes to the universal good. "God sends not ill, if rightly understood." According to this principle, vices, themselves to be deplored, may lead to virtues. For example, motivated by envy, a person may develop courage and wish to emulate the accomplishments of another; and the avaricious person may attain the virtue of prudence. One can easily understand why, from the beginning, many felt that Pope had depended on Leibnitz.

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The story of a working man who lived through apartheid – and his struggles after it ended

Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Zululand

Distinguished Reserach Professor, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

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Edward Webster receives funding from the Ford Foundation and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. He is affiliated to the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand.

Paul Stewart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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On 25 June, Mandlenkosi Makhoba, one of the last of a generation of grassroots worker leaders of the Federation of South African Trade Unions ( Fosatu ), was laid to rest above the majestic Mahlabathini plain in KwaZulu-Natal. He was 78.

Industrial workers such as Makhoba formed the basis of Fosatu, established in 1979 when democratic workers’ organisations forced the apartheid system to recognise their trade unions . This federation went on to win rights for black workers, contributed to a new workplace order and the establishment of national collective bargaining, while challenging racism and inequality in the workplace. It laid the basis for the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985 with organised labour proving decisive in the transition to democracy.

Makhoba was, therefore, one of the “agents of change” who gave birth to South Africa’s modern labour movement. But he was not one of its beneficiaries. His death marks the passing of the era of the ‘labouring man’ – those industrial workers who were involved largely in manual labour, denied much formal education but stood for worker solidarity.

A working man’s life under apartheid

Makhoba’s life story illustrates the transition of established organised labour, from the voice of the dispossessed production worker struggling for recognition, to the relatively well protected suburban worker of today. He also represents the losers in the new South Africa, showing how inequality is consistently produced and reproduced. It tells the story of dreams lost and the need to recover the vision of a disappearing generation.

The stories of these working men and women has long been overshadowed by the big men and women of the successful struggle for democracy. Fortunately Makhoba lived to see the republication, in 2018, of his autobiography, The Story of One Tells the Struggle of All: Metalworkers under Apartheid . His story prefigures what has happened both locally and globally, namely how organised factory- and mine-based manual labour became sidelined by both advances in technology and the rise of neoliberalism.

We first met Makhoba, a foundry worker on the East Rand, now Ekhuruleni, nearly 40 years ago while researching the changing world of work in the metal industry. This archetypal, barrel-chested ‘labouring man’ poured molten metal to mould machine parts long before health and safety was taken seriously.

Alongside so many of his compatriots, he had migrated from his rural home in the “ Bantustan ” of KwaZulu to perform the toughest jobs that demanded physical strength and industrial discipline. “Bantustans” were the then mainly rural, undeveloped areas were black people were required to live under apartheid.

Seen as an unskilled “cast boy” under apartheid, Makhoba was paid considerably less than the white “supervisors” he had trained. “That made me angry,” he said at the time.

I don’t get the money he is getting, but I am supposed to be his teacher! How can a clever man be taught by a stupid man like myself?

Throughout his working life Makhoba oscillated between town and countryside. He lived in the sprawling single sex hostel complex for black male migrant workers in Vosloorus, to the east of Johannesburg, a bus drive from his workplace. He was deeply dissatisfied with the filthy conditions in the hostel and the lack of privacy, with 16 men to a room and not much better than the mine compounds and concrete bunks these hostels had replaced. Men had to cook after a long day’s work and travel. Theft was rife and excessive drinking and violent assaults marked the weekends.

Accompanying this sense of deprivation was the resigned acceptance of being unable to live a normal social life. Of greatest concern for Makhoba was going home to Mahlabathini, only to find the decline of parental authority. This affected him deeply.

When a man comes home there is no respect for him anymore, because he has been away from home for such a long time.

It is not surprising then that in July 1979 Makhoba joined a fledgling metal union at the time, later to become the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa . He said:

I joined the union because workers are not treated like human beings by management, but like animals.

The men who joined the union came from similar districts in KwaZulu and elsewhere and shared the rigours of hostel life. They were, in other words, rooted in networks of mutual support.

Although Makhoba had been working in the city intermittently for 20 years when we first met him, his cultural world was shaped by his rural values:

I work here, but my spirit is in Mahlabathini. My spirit is there because I come from the countryside. I was born there and my father was born there.

In 1983 he was dismissed from the foundry for participating in an illegal strike. Following episodic periods of temporary employment, he returned home permanently.

Deprivations of rural life

In 1991 we tracked him down to his homestead on a mountain top in Mahlabathini. He had acquired 15 head of cattle, ten from the ilobolo (bride price) of his two oldest daughters.

Fifteen people – his wife and 14 children – lived with him in the six rondavels of his neatly swept homestead where he had access to land on which he grew maize and some vegetables.

But a closer examination of this household revealed a sad reality: Mandlenkosi’s home was a picturesque version of a rural slum. The children spent their days doing household chores, chopping firewood and collecting water twice daily from the local stream half a kilometre away. Their diet, except on special occasions, was confined to mealie meal and they often faced hunger.

As the children matured and moved away, Makhoba suffered increasingly poor health. Unable to continue working at a local store, the lack of food intensified. As he drifted into the long autumn of his life, suffering with Parkinson’s disease, the family had become too poor to farm their land. The hopes of yesteryear, of a new start and a new, better society, had become “a dream”.

The inequality in life-chances that shaped Mandlenkosi’s life continues as his children are part of the growing millions of marginalised workers eking out an existence in the rural slums and informal settlements of our urban areas.

Meanwhile, today Cosatu is largely a home for relatively privileged public sector workers, a third of whom have post high school qualifications and 40% have professional jobs . Production in the foundry where Makhoba once worked is now largely robotised.

With many of the manual jobs disappearing, it is farewell to the traditional labouring man as the precarious worker of the digital age is ushered in.

• Neoliberalism
• Trade unions
• inequality in South Africa
• Digital era
• wage discrimination
• Labour reform
• Workers' rights
• Manual work
• Urban informal settlements

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The Company Man by Ellen Goodman [Summary and Answers]

In the essay “ The Company Man ” the author Ellen Goodman describes a man who “ worked himself to death ” at fifty-one. Goodman works by implication and presents facts about the man’s life and work, allowing the readers to draw their conclusion.

Summary of the essay The Company Man by Ellen Goodman

In the essay ‘ The Company Man’ , Ellen Goodman satirizes the mechanical and hectic life of developed countries .

Phil was an employee who was a workaholic (hardworking man). While working, he died. He was 51 years old. As he died of heart problem, at that time he was working in an office on holiday (Sunday) at 3 am. He worked six days a week and five of them, he worked 8 or 9 at night. He thought that he was an important person in the office. He did not have time to eat food at home. So, he would eat salad sandwiches at his office. He was so busy. So, he could not give time to his family members so he was like an unknown person at home.

His wife Helen was 48 years old. She was also a job holder before marriage. On her husband's death day, Phil's company friend sympathized saying that she had missed him a lot. In response, she says that she had already missed him for many years.

Phil’s eldest son also did not know how his father was. So, he went to ask around the neighborhood about his father. His second child was a daughter who was 24 and newly married. She also did not speak much with her father as she was in his father's car. It means that there was a communication gap between them.

His youngest son was very near to him. He also said that his father and he only boarded. At this funeral, 65 - year - old company president said that the company would miss him much and hard to get another man like Phil. Helen didn’t not want to hear such ideas from him. She needed financial support from the company.

In this way, the essay shows that a company in the industrial age only counts on staff hardworking. It only seeks the benefit and welfare of the company.

Frequently asked questions from the essay The Company Man by Ellen Goodman

1. "He always ate egg salad sandwiches at his desk". What is the implication of this sentence?

Ans : The implication of this sentence shows the prediction of developed country people. They work like a machine day in and day out. So, they do not have enough time to have a meal at home. In the story, a workaholic, the vice president of office eats egg salad sandwiches as a meal.

2. What attitude does Phil's wife have toward him?

Ans : Phil's wife thinks that he only led his life for office. He did not give time to her. So, as he was alive, she had missed him for many years.

3. What point does the writer make about the general situation of which Phil is only a part?

Ans : The writer makes the point that he is a main pillar of the office Phil himself thought that he was an important person for the office but it was just his illusion. The office does not take him as important but it only counts his labor and work. If he becomes weak and old, he will be fired from his job

4. The writer has repeated the time of Phil's death in three places. Give examples of other repetitions in the essay. What is the function of the repetitions?

Ans : She repeats, he died "at 3 am in three places to say that in a developed country, people work like a machine in their entire life. Generally, people sleep till 6 am but Phil works at 3 am.

5. What tone is established by the short sentences in the essay? Is it ironic acerbic, sarcastic, or neutral? Why?

Ans : The tone of the essay is sarcastic because it shows the predicament of the modern man who works like a machine and forgets family bonds and ties.

6. Most of the sentences are of the SVO type. What is the effect of such hear the use of repeated sentence forms?

Ans : SVO types of sentences are repeated to make parallel with repetitive and routinized work of modern man.

7. Write an essay explaining what it means to be a company man or company woman.

Ans : To be a company man or company woman means to work like a machine. Boss only values his / her effort and work. He/her will be fired if he/her became old, sick, and physically disabled to contribute to the office. Being a company man or woman means to be unknown at home. He/she does not have enough time to spend with his/her family members. Even on a holiday, a boss can invite meeting and call them to attend.

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An Essay on Man

“Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or Thee?” – Alexander Pope (From “An Essay on Man”)

“Then say not Man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault; Say rather, Man’s as perfect as he ought.” – Alexander Pope (From “An Essay on Man”)

“All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.” – Alexander Pope (From “An Essay on Man”)

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things

To low ambition, and the pride of kings., let us (since life can little more supply, than just to look about us and die), expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;, a mighty maze but not without a plan;, a wild, where weed and flow’rs promiscuous shoot;, or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit., together let us beat this ample field,, try what the open, what the covert yield;, the latent tracts, the giddy heights explore, of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;, eye nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies,, and catch the manners living as they rise;, laugh where we must, be candid where we can;, but vindicate the ways of god to man. (pope 1-16), background on alexander pope.

Alexander Pope is a British poet who was born in London, England in 1688 (World Biography 1). Growing up during the Augustan Age, his poetry is heavily influenced by common literary qualities of that time, which include classical influence, the importance of human reason and the rules of nature. These qualities are widely represented in Pope’s poetry. Some of Pope’s most notable works are “The Rape of the Lock,” “An Essay on Criticism,” and “An Essay on Man.”

Overview of “An Essay on Man”

“An Essay on Man” was published in 1734 and contained very deep and well thought out philosophical ideas. It is said that these ideas were partially influenced by his friend, Henry St. John Bolingbroke, who Pope addresses in the first line of Epistle I when he says, “Awake, my St. John!”(Pope 1)(World Biography 1) The purpose of the poem is to address the role of humans as part of the “Great Chain of Being.” In other words, it speaks of man as just one small part of an unfathomably complex universe. Pope urges us to learn from what is around us, what we can observe ourselves in nature, and to not pry into God’s business or question his ways; For everything that happens, both good and bad, happens for a reason. This idea is summed up in the very last lines of the poem when he says, “And, Spite of pride in erring reason’s spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever IS, is RIGHT.”(Pope 293-294) The poem is broken up into four epistles each of which is labeled as its own subcategory of the overall work. They are as follows:

• Epistle I – Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to the Universe
• Epistle II – Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to Himself, as an Individual
• Epistle III – Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to Society
• Epistle IV – Of the Nature and State of Man with Respect to Happiness

Epistle 1 Intro In the introduction to Pope’s first Epistle, he summarizes the central thesis of his essay in the last line. The purpose of “An Essay on Man” is then to shift or enhance the reader’s perception of what is natural or correct. By doing this, one would justify the happenings of life, and the workings of God, for there is a reason behind all things that is beyond human understanding. Pope’s endeavor to highlight the infallibility of nature is a key aspect of the Augustan period in literature; a poet’s goal was to convey truth by creating a mirror image of nature. This is envisaged in line 13 when, keeping with the hunting motif, Pope advises his reader to study the behaviors of Nature (as hunter would watch his prey), and to rid of all follies, which we can assume includes all that is unnatural. He also encourages the exploration of one’s surroundings, which provides for a gateway to new discoveries and understandings of our purpose here on Earth. Furthermore, in line 12, Pope hints towards vital middle ground on which we are above beats and below a higher power(s). Those who “blindly creep” are consumed by laziness and a willful ignorance, and just as bad are those who “sightless soar” and believe that they understand more than they can possibly know. Thus, it is imperative that we can strive to gain knowledge while maintaining an acceptance of our mental limits.

1. Pope writes the first section to put the reader into the perspective that he believes to yield the correct view of the universe. He stresses the fact that we can only understand things based on what is around us, embodying the relationship with empiricism that characterizes the Augustan era. He encourages the discovery of new things while remaining within the bounds one has been given. These bounds, or the Chain of Being, designate each living thing’s place in the universe, and only God can see the system in full. Pope is adamant in God’s omniscience, and uses that as a sure sign that we can never reach a level of knowledge comparable to His. In the last line however, he questions whether God or man plays a bigger role in maintaining the chain once it is established.

2. The overarching message in section two is envisaged in one of the last couplets: “Then say not Man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault; Say rather, Man’s as perfect as he ought.” Pope utilizes this section to explain the folly of “Presumptuous Man,” for the fact that we tend to dwell on our limitations rather than capitalize on our abilities. He emphasizes the rightness of our place in the chain of being, for just as we steer the lives of lesser creatures, God has the ability to pilot our fate. Furthermore, he asserts that because we can only analyze what is around us, we cannot be sure that there is not a greater being or sphere beyond our level of comprehension; it is most logical to perceive the universe as functioning through a hierarchal system.

3. Pope utilizes the beginning of section three to elaborate on the functions of the chain of being. He claims that each creatures’ ignorance, including our own, allows for a full and happy life without the possible burden of understanding our fates. Instead of consuming ourselves with what we cannot know, we instead should place hope in a peaceful “life to come.” Pope connects this after-life to the soul, and colors it with a new focus on a more primitive people, “the Indian,” whose souls have not been distracted by power or greed. As humble and level headed beings, Indian’s, and those who have similar beliefs, see life as the ultimate gift and have no vain desires of becoming greater than Man ought to be.

4. In the fourth stanza, Pope warns against the negative effects of excessive pride. He places his primary examples in those who audaciously judge the work of God and declare one person to be too fortunate and another not fortunate enough. He also satirizes Man’s selfish content in destroying other creatures for his own benefit, while complaining when they believe God to be unjust to Man. Pope capitalizes on his point with the final and resonating couplet: “who but wishes to invert the laws of order, sins against th’ Eternal Cause.” This connects to the previous stanza in which the soul is explored; those who wrestle with their place in the universe will disturb the chain of being and warrant punishment instead of gain rewards in the after-life.

5. In the beginning of the fifth stanza, Pope personifies Pride and provides selfish answers to questions regarding the state of the universe. He depicts Pride as a hoarder of all gifts that Nature yields. The image of Nature as a benefactor and Man as her avaricious recipient is countered in the next set of lines: Pope instead entertains the possible faults of Nature in natural disasters such as earthquakes and storms. However, he denies this possibility on the grounds that there is a larger purpose behind all happenings and that God acts by “general laws.” Finally, Pope considers the emergence of evil in human nature and concludes that we are not in a place that allows us to explain such things–blaming God for human misdeeds is again an act of pride.

6. Stanza six connects the different inhabitants of the earth to their rightful place and shows why things are the way they should be. After highlighting the happiness in which most creatures live, Pope facetiously questions if God is unkind to man alone. He asks this because man consistently yearns for the abilities specific to those outside of his sphere, and in that way can never be content in his existence. Pope counters the notorious greed of Man by illustrating the pointless emptiness that would accompany a world in which Man was omnipotent. Furthermore, he describes a blissful lifestyle as one centered around one’s own sphere, without the distraction of seeking unattainable heights.

7. The seventh stanza explores the vastness of the sensory and cognitive spectrums in relation to all earthly creatures. Pope uses an example related to each of the five senses to conjure an image that emphasizes the intricacies with which all things are tailored. For instance, he references a bee’s sensitivity, which allows it to collect only that which is beneficial amid dangerous substances. Pope then moves to the differences in mental abilities along the chain of being. These mental functions are broken down into instinct, reflection, memory, and reason. Pope believes reason to trump all, which of course is the one function specific to Man. Reason thus allows man to synthesize the means to function in ways that are unnatural to himself.

8. In section 8 Pope emphasizes the depths to which the universe extends in all aspects of life. This includes the literal depths of the ocean and the reversed extent of the sky, as well as the vastness that lies between God and Man and Man and the simpler creatures of the earth. Regardless of one’s place in the chain of being however, the removal of one link creates just as much of an impact as any other. Pope stresses the maintenance of order so as to prevent the breaking down of the universe.

9. In the ninth stanza, Pope once again puts the pride and greed of man into perspective. He compares man’s complaints of being subordinate to God to an eye or an ear rejecting its service to the mind. This image drives home the point that all things are specifically designed to ensure that the universe functions properly. Pope ends this stanza with the Augustan belief that Nature permeates all things, and thus constitutes the body of the world, where God characterizes the soul.

10. In the tenth stanza, Pope secures the end of Epistle 1 by advising the reader on how to secure as many blessings as possible, whether that be on earth or in the after life. He highlights the impudence in viewing God’s order as imperfect and emphasizes the fact that true bliss can only be experienced through an acceptance of one’s necessary weaknesses. Pope exemplifies this acceptance of weakness in the last lines of Epistle 1 in which he considers the incomprehensible, whether seemingly miraculous or disastrous, to at least be correct, if nothing else.

1. Epistle II is broken up into six smaller sections, each of which has a specific focus. The first section explains that man must not look to God for answers to the great questions of life, for he will never find the answers. As was explained in the first epistle, man is incapable of truly knowing anything about the things that are higher than he is on the “Great Chain of Being.” For this reason, the way to achieve the greatest knowledge possible is to study man, the greatest thing we have the ability to comprehend. Pope emphasizes the complexity of man in an effort to show that understanding of anything greater than that would simply be too much for any person to fully comprehend. He explains this complexity with lines such as, “Created half to rise, and half to fall; / Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all / Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!”(15-18) These lines say that we are created for two purposes, to live and die. We are the most intellectual creatures on Earth, and while we have control over most things, we are still set up to die in some way by the end. We are a great gift of God to the Earth with enormous capabilities, yet in the end we really amount to nothing. Pope describes this contrast between our intellectual capabilities and our inevitable fate as a “riddle” of the world. The first section of Epistle II closes by saying that man is to go out and study what is around him. He is to study science to understand all that he can about his existence and the universe in which he lives, but to fully achieve this knowledge he must rid himself of all vices that may slow down this process.

2. The second section of Epistle II tells of the two principles of human nature and how they are to perfectly balance each other out in order for man to achieve all that he is capable of achieving. These two principles are self-love and reason. He explains that all good things can be attributed to the proper use of these two principles and that all bad things stem from their improper use. Pope further discusses the two principles by claiming that self-love is what causes man to do what he desires, but reason is what allows him to know how to stay in line. He follows that with an interesting comparison of man to a flower by saying man is “Fix’d like a plant on his peculiar spot, / To draw nutrition, propagate and rot,” (Pope 62-63) and also of man to a meteor by saying, “Or, meteor-like, flame lawless thro’ the void, / Destroying others, by himself destroy’d.” (Pope 64-65) These comparisons show that man, according to Pope, is born, takes his toll on the Earth, and then dies, and it is all part of a larger plan. The rest of section two continues to talk about the relationship between self-love and reason and closes with a strong argument. Humans all seek pleasure, but only with a good sense of reason can they restrain themselves from becoming greedy. His final remarks are strong, stating that, “Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood, / Our greatest evil, or our greatest good,”(Pope 90-91) which means that pleasure in moderation can be a great thing for man, but without the balance that reason produces, a pursuit of pleasure can have terrible consequences.

3. Part III of Epistle II also pertains to the idea of self-love and reason working together. It starts out talking about passions and how they are inherently selfish, but if the means to which these passions are sought out are fair, then there has been a proper balance of self-love and reason. Pope describes love, hope and joy as being “Fair treasure’s smiling train,”(Pope 117) while hate, fear and grief are “The family of pain.”(Pope 118) Too much of any of these things, whether they be from the negative or positive side, is a bad thing. There is a ratio of good to bad that man must reach to have a well balanced mind. We learn, grow, and gain character and perspective through the elements of this “Family of pain,”(Pope 118) while we get great rewards from love, hope and joy. While our goal as humans is to seek our pleasure and follow certain desires, there is always one overall passion that lives deep within us that guides us throughout life. The main points to take away from Section III of this Epistle is that there are many aspects to the life of man, and these aspects, both positive and negative, need to coexist harmoniously to achieve that balance for which man should strive.

4. The fourth section of Epistle II is very short. It starts off by asking what allows us to determine the difference between good and bad. The next line answers this question by saying that it is the God within our minds that allows us to make such judgements. This section finishes up by discussing virtue and vice. The relationship between these two qualities are interesting, for they can exist on their own but most often mix, and there is a fine line between something being a virtue and becoming a vice.

5. Section V is even shorter than section IV with just fourteen lines. It speaks only of the quality of vice. Vices are temptations that man must face on a consistent basis. A line that stands out from this says that when it comes to vices, “We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”(Pope 218) This means that vices start off as something we know is wrong, but over time they become an instinctive part of us if reason is not there to push them away.

6. Section VI, the final section of Epistle II, relates many of the ideas from Sections I-V back to ideas from Epistle I. It works as a conclusion that ties in the main theme of Epistle II, which mainly speaks of the different components of man that balance each other out to form an infinitely complex creature, into the idea from Epistle I that man is created as part of a larger plan with all of his qualities given to him for a specific purpose. It is a way of looking at both negative and positive aspects of life and being content with them both, for they are all part of God’s purpose of creating the universe. This idea is well concluded in the third to last line of this Epistle when Pope says, “Ev’n mean self-love becomes, by force divine.”(Pope 288) This shows that even a negative quality in a man, such as excessive self-love without the stability of reason, is technically divine, for it is what God intended as part of the balance of the universe.

Contributors

• Dan Connolly
• Nicole Petrone

“Alexander Pope.” : The Poetry Foundation . N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2013. < http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/alexander-pope >.

“Alexander Pope Photos.” Rugu RSS . N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2013. < http://www.rugusavay.com/alexander-pope-photos/ >.

“An Essay on Man: Epistle 1 by Alexander Pope • 81 Poems by Alexander PopeEdit.” An Essay on Man: Epistle 1 by Alexander Pope Classic Famous Poet . N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2013. < http://allpoetry.com/poem/8448567-An_Essay_on_Man_Epistle_1-by-Alexander_Pope >.

“An Essay on Man: Epistle II.” By Alexander Pope : The Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2013. < http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174166 >.

“Benjamin Franklin’s Mastodon Tooth.” About.com Archaeology . N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2013. < http://archaeology.about.com/od/artandartifacts/ss/franklin_4.htm >.

“First Edition of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Offered by The Manhattan Rare Book Company.” First Edition of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Offered by The Manhattan Rare Book Company. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 May 2013. < http://www.manhattanrarebooks- literature.com/pope_essay.htm>.

Essay on Hard Work

500 words essay on  hard work.

Hard work is an essential thing we all need in life. It is impossible to achieve greatness without working hard. In other words, an idle person cannot gain anything if they wish to sit and wait for something else. On the other hand, one who keeps working hard constantly will definitely gain success in life and this is exactly what essay on hard work will elaborate upon.

Importance of Hard Work

Hard work is important and history has proved it time and again. The great Edison used to work for many hours a day and he dozed off on his laboratory table only with his books as his pillow.

Similarly, the prime minister of India, late Pt. Nehru used to work for 17 hours a day and seven days a week. He did not enjoy any holidays. Our great leader, Mahatma Gandhi worked round the clock to win freedom for our country.

Thus, we see that hard work paid off for all these people. One must be constantly vigil to work hard as it can help you achieve your dreams. As we say, man is born to work. Just like steel, he shines in use and rusts in rest.

When we work hard in life, we can achieve anything and overcome any obstacle. Moreover, we can also lead a better life knowing that we have put in our all and given our best to whatever work we are doing.

Key to Success

Hard work is definitely the key to success. What we earn by sweating our brow gives us greater happiness than something we get by a stroke of luck. As humans, we wish to achieve many things in life.

These things need hard work to be able to come true. Poverty is not the curse but idealness is. When we waste our time, time will also waste us. Hard work can help anyone achieve success. Great people were born in cottages but died in palaces.

Thus, it shows how through great work one can get the key to success. When you start working hard, you will notice changes in your life. You will become more disciplined and focused on your work.

Moreover, you will start seeing results within a short time. It is nothing but proof that when you work hard, things like determination, focus, concentration, come automatically to you. As a result, nothing will stop you from achieving success .

Success is not just someone being famous and rich in life. When you work hard and lead a comfortable life filled with love that is also a success. Hard work must not limit to work but also your personal life. When you put in hard work in work and relationships, life will prosper.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Hard Work

If we get the determination and focus, we can all work hard for a better future. It is important to concentrate as it ensures our work is finishing on time and in a better manner. Therefore, by working hard, we can increase our concentration power and open doors to new opportunities.

FAQ of Essay on Hard Work

Question 1: What is the importance of hard work?

Answer 1: Hard work teaches us discipline , dedication and determination. It is certainly important because it is only through hard work that we can achieve the goals of our life. Thus, we all must work hard.

Question 2: Does hard work lead to success?

Answer 2: Yes, hard work, together with the time will definitely lead to success. It is what can help you achieve a better life. Moreover, the harder you work, the more confident you will become in life.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Workplace — Working from Home vs. Working in an Office

Working from Home Vs. Working in an Office

• Categories: Workplace

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Words: 860 |

Published: Sep 7, 2023

Words: 860 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Productivity: working from home vs. working in an office, work-life balance and distractions, communication and collaboration, health and well-being, personal and professional life.

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Women’s Work Advantages and Disadvantages Essay

This argumentative essay about women’s work explains all the disadvantages and advantages of being a woman in the workplace. The positive and negative effects of being a working mother are also presented, so you might draw your own conclusion on the issue.

Introduction

• Disadvantages

In today’s world, women take active roles in employment, unlike during the olden days when they stayed at home and took care of their families. Women taking active roles in jobs have advantages and disadvantages. In contemporary society, women and men have equal opportunities for employment.

Working Women Advantages

The advantages of women working include more income for their families, the opportunity to explore their talents, and the promotion of economic growth. When women work, they make money that adds to their families’ financial well-being. This helps pay bills, buy food, and educate children. Women have goals and objectives to achieve in their lives. Working allows them to pursue their dreams and talents, as well as work on their goals by pursuing careers of their choice. Finally, women who work contribute towards economic growth through their jobs.

Women’s Work Disadvantages

Disadvantages for working women include the absence of enough time for their families, pressure from work-related stress, and conflicts of interest. Working women have little time to take care of their families because their jobs are very demanding and time-consuming. Many jobs are very stressful, and many women cannot handle high levels of work-related stress. Their nature predisposes them to anxiety and depression more than when compared to men. Finally, there is a conflict of interests. Their roles as mothers compromise their performance at work. They use working hours to take care of their children at the expense of their jobs.

Today, women seek employment opportunities just like men. This increases income for their families and gives them opportunities to explore their talents by pursuing careers of their choice. However, it affects their families because they do not spend enough time with their children. In addition, their role as mothers has involved my performance at work.

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• Essay on Literature

Working Class Heroes Essay Example

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Literature , Class , Sociology , Batman , Working , Man , People , Working Class

Words: 1500

Published: 03/08/2023

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First of all, I would like to focus on the story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story is about Mr. Neville St. Clair, who has recently moved to the area. He rented a luxurious villa. Mr. St. Clair is happily married and had two children. His neighbors consider him to be a wonderful family man, and an excellent person. The character is engaged in commerce and seems to experience no financial difficulties. However, one day Mr. Neville St. Clair disappears. His wife asks Sherlock Holmes to find him. She tells Mr. Holmes that on the day, when her husband disappeared, she had to pass by the port, where the poor usually gathered. One of the homeless, a lame cripple named Hugh Boone, gained special popularity. His had a repulsive appearance and was scarred. The man was selling wax matches and attracted buyers with his witty sense of humor. Eventually, Sherlock Homes managed to find out that the homeless cripple was actually the missing Neville St. Clair. Therefore, a question arises: what made a respectful man pretend that he was homeless? Neville St. Clair received an excellent education. During his young years, he took up many professions. He was an actor and a reporter. One day he was assigned to write a newspaper article about the poor. In order to receive the necessary material, Neville made-up and sat down in a busy place to beg. By evening, he was surprised to find that he had earned a decent amount of money. However, Neville forgot about this case, until he did not have to pay the debt. With the aim of getting the required amount, he took a leave from his work and went begging. When Neville St. Clair realized that begging would bring him more money, he quit his job. This secret was known only to the owner of a brothel and Neville generously paid him. All in all, Neville swears a solemn oath to give up this occupation. Sherlock Holmes summarizes: “But it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 244). It can be said that in this story Sir Author Conan Doyle eliminates the gap between the rich and the poor. The author highlights interdependence between the two different social worlds. The main thesis is that the status and respect do not always bring the desired wealth. One more example from the class readings, which I would like to analyze in this essay, is the story “The South of the Slot” by Jack London. The story tells us about Freddie Drummond, who is a professor of sociology in the University of California. Mr. Drummond conducts his field researches by pretending to be a man from the labor ghetto. He wrote several notorious books on the subject, including "The Unskilled Laborer", "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch" and "Message to Garcia". His work “The Unskilled Laborer” is considered to be a valuable contribution into the progressive literature. It should be noted that the professor, being deeply devoted to his studies, is entirely convinced that a good book requires living with the so-called “working class heroes”: “He endeavored really to know the working people, and the only possible way to achieve this was to work beside them, eat their food, sleep in their beds, be amused with their amusements, think their thoughts, and feel their feelings” (Selected Short Stories, 818). However, in order to complete this task, the professor penetrates into the labor environment and conducts the so-called "participant observation". For that purpose, a new worker Bill Tots is invented. Initially, Mr. Drummond simply played his part as a good actor, but over the time, Bill Tots becomes his second personality. Gradually, after certain adaptation, Mr. Drummond not only experiences the existing problems, but also becomes the leader of the labor movement. Nevertheless, this happens only when he pretended to be Bill. When Freddie returns to the classic atmosphere of the University, he regains the ability to calmly and impartially summarize the adventures, which occurred to him at the “bottom”. The professor is ready to write everything down on paper. He acts as a social scientist, by sincerely distancing himself from the problems of the labor class. Suffering from the internal split, the professor decides to stay in the world of permanently secured and prosperous people. The moment of culmination comes, when the professor and his fiancée are visiting a new youth club in the labor district. The fiancée was involved in the construction of the club. On their way, they see the labor strikers, who are fighting with the police. Suddenly, a sense of solidarity awakes in the soul of Freddie Drummond; he enters the fight on the side of the workers. Eventually, he goes to live together with the workers. Thus, he makes a decision to return to the stormy life of the working class forever. Overall, it may be said that the story underlines the importance of humanism in our life. Jack London encourages us to participate in every aspect of the human existence, without limiting ourselves. The author condemns sticking to certain models of social behavior and motivates us to broad our horizons by providing assistance to those, who need it. Moreover, the idea of migration to the lower social class is often depicted in the popular culture. Judging from my experience, I should say that the example of Batman is the most suitable illustration of the process in question. In the original version of his biography, Batman is the secret alter ego of a billionaire Bruce Wayne, who is also a successful industrialist and philanthropist. Bruce is extremely popular among young women. However, as a child, he witnessed the murder of both his parents. Bruce vowed to devote his life to the eradication of crime and the fight for justice. Having prepare himself both physically and mentally, he puts on a bat-styled suit and goes to the streets to confront the violence. The stories about Batman take place in a fictional American city of Gotham. With the assistance of several supporting characters, Batman fight against the criminal community, corrupted politicians and authorities of Gotham, as well as against a group of villains, including The Joker, Poison Ivy and Penguin. Unlike most superheroes, Batman does not possess any superpower. He uses his intellect, martial arts skills as well as knowledge of science and technology. Batman has the indomitable will. He is able to instill fear and to intimidate his enemies. In my opinion, Batman demonstrates us how important are our choices. His example deeply inspires me, by providing clear evidence that money cannot shape our values and personality. The last piece of culture to mention in this essay is the song “Working Class Hero” by John Lennon. The singer leads us to understanding that nowadays all the people are chasing money and ignore the idea of true happiness. He highlights that everyone is happy with being just an element of the system in the modern consumer society:

“A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're still f**king peasants as far as I can see (John Lennon, Working Class Hero). All things considered, I am entirely convinced that money and social class are the roots of the evil as long as people take them for granted without trying to change anything. However, when one gets involved into helping the others, he begins to see that all the people are equal and same in their essence. Therefore, the realization of this equality is the main part of the process of critical thinking development. The next stage is tolerance towards the others and the ability “to think out of the box”. To certain extent, when you understand that your social status does not determine your personality, the political system can no longer brainwash you. Overall, in this essay I have analyzed two classical stories (namely, “The Man with the Twised Lip” and “The South of the Slot”), a fictional superhero and a song from popular culture. This analysis helped me to prove that the social inequality does not make people differ from each other. Eventually, we are all the same in our essence.

Works Cited

Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith Publisher, 1965. Print. Lennon, John. Working Class Hero. Web. 25 Mar. 2016. <http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnlennon/workingclasshero.html> London, Jack. Selected Short Stories. Airmont: Airmont Publishing Co., Inc., 1969. Print.

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The Case for Marrying an Older Man

A woman’s life is all work and little rest. an age gap relationship can help..

In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery. We take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. I purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. I never cash them in, nor do I check the winning numbers. For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.

He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.

When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.

So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist , frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.

Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me.  But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.

Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.

To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.

Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.

Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.

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That Viral Essay Wasn’t About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

But both tactics are flawed if you want to have any hope of becoming yourself..

Women are wisest, a viral essay in New York magazine’s the Cut argues , to maximize their most valuable cultural assets— youth and beauty—and marry older men when they’re still very young. Doing so, 27-year-old writer Grazie Sophia Christie writes, opens up a life of ease, and gets women off of a male-defined timeline that has our professional and reproductive lives crashing irreconcilably into each other. Sure, she says, there are concessions, like one’s freedom and entire independent identity. But those are small gives in comparison to a life in which a person has no adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to become oneself.

This is all framed as rational, perhaps even feminist advice, a way for women to quit playing by men’s rules and to reject exploitative capitalist demands—a choice the writer argues is the most obviously intelligent one. That other Harvard undergraduates did not busy themselves trying to attract wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy men seems to flummox her (taking her “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out” to the Harvard Business School library, “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”). But it’s nothing more than a recycling of some of the oldest advice around: For women to mold themselves around more-powerful men, to never grow into independent adults, and to find happiness in a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, submission, and dependence. These are odd choices for an aspiring writer (one wonders what, exactly, a girl who never wants to grow up and has no idea who she is beyond what a man has made her into could possibly have to write about). And it’s bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.

But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

These, by the way, are the things she says are benefits of marrying older.

The downsides are many, including a basic inability to express a full range of human emotion (“I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that constrains the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”) and an understanding that she owes back, in some other form, what he materially provides (the most revealing line in the essay may be when she claims that “when someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them”). It is clear that part of what she has paid in exchange for a paid-for life is a total lack of any sense of self, and a tacit agreement not to pursue one. “If he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive,” she writes, “but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.”

Reading Christie’s essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion’s on self-respect , in which Didion argues that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” Self-respect may not make life effortless and easy. But it means that whenever “we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” at least we can fall asleep.

It can feel catty to publicly criticize another woman’s romantic choices, and doing so inevitably opens one up to accusations of jealousy or pettiness. But the stories we tell about marriage, love, partnership, and gender matter, especially when they’re told in major culture-shaping magazines. And it’s equally as condescending to say that women’s choices are off-limits for critique, especially when those choices are shared as universal advice, and especially when they neatly dovetail with resurgent conservative efforts to make women’s lives smaller and less independent. “Marry rich” is, as labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards put it in Bloomberg, essentially the Republican plan for mothers. The model of marriage as a hierarchy with a breadwinning man on top and a younger, dependent, submissive woman meeting his needs and those of their children is not exactly a fresh or groundbreaking ideal. It’s a model that kept women trapped and miserable for centuries.

It’s also one that profoundly stunted women’s intellectual and personal growth. In her essay for the Cut, Christie seems to believe that a life of ease will abet a life freed up for creative endeavors, and happiness. But there’s little evidence that having material abundance and little adversity actually makes people happy, let alone more creatively generativ e . Having one’s basic material needs met does seem to be a prerequisite for happiness. But a meaningful life requires some sense of self, an ability to look outward rather than inward, and the intellectual and experiential layers that come with facing hardship and surmounting it.

A good and happy life is not a life in which all is easy. A good and happy life (and here I am borrowing from centuries of philosophers and scholars) is one characterized by the pursuit of meaning and knowledge, by deep connections with and service to other people (and not just to your husband and children), and by the kind of rich self-knowledge and satisfaction that comes from owning one’s choices, taking responsibility for one’s life, and doing the difficult and endless work of growing into a fully-formed person—and then evolving again. Handing everything about one’s life over to an authority figure, from the big decisions to the minute details, may seem like a path to ease for those who cannot stomach the obligations and opportunities of their own freedom. It’s really an intellectual and emotional dead end.

And what kind of man seeks out a marriage like this, in which his only job is to provide, but very much is owed? What kind of man desires, as the writer cast herself, a raw lump of clay to be molded to simply fill in whatever cracks in his life needed filling? And if the transaction is money and guidance in exchange for youth, beauty, and pliability, what happens when the young, beautiful, and pliable party inevitably ages and perhaps feels her backbone begin to harden? What happens if she has children?

The thing about using youth and beauty as a currency is that those assets depreciate pretty rapidly. There is a nearly endless supply of young and beautiful women, with more added each year. There are smaller numbers of wealthy older men, and the pool winnows down even further if one presumes, as Christie does, that many of these men want to date and marry compliant twentysomethings. If youth and beauty are what you’re exchanging for a man’s resources, you’d better make sure there’s something else there—like the basic ability to provide for yourself, or at the very least a sense of self—to back that exchange up.

It is hard to be an adult woman; it’s hard to be an adult, period. And many women in our era of unfinished feminism no doubt find plenty to envy about a life in which they don’t have to work tirelessly to barely make ends meet, don’t have to manage the needs of both children and man-children, could simply be taken care of for once. This may also explain some of the social media fascination with Trad Wives and stay-at-home girlfriends (some of that fascination is also, I suspect, simply a sexual submission fetish , but that’s another column). Fantasies of leisure reflect a real need for it, and American women would be far better off—happier, freer—if time and resources were not so often so constrained, and doled out so inequitably.

But the way out is not actually found in submission, and certainly not in electing to be carried by a man who could choose to drop you at any time. That’s not a life of ease. It’s a life of perpetual insecurity, knowing your spouse believes your value is decreasing by the day while his—an actual dollar figure—rises. A life in which one simply allows another adult to do all the deciding for them is a stunted life, one of profound smallness—even if the vacations are nice.

Man pleads guilty to stealing 18-carat golden toilet from art installation

James sheen, 39, pleaded guilty to the charges at the oxford crown court on tuesday. three other men charged in connection to the case have pleaded not guilty..

A British man has pleaded guilty to stealing an 18-carat golden toilet that was part of an art exhibition in England, multiple news outlets have reported.

James Sheen, 39, was charged with one count each of burglary, conspiracy to transfer criminal property and transferring criminal property, the Crown Prosecution Service said in November.

Sheen, from Wellingborough in Northamptonshire just northwest of London, pleaded guilty to the charges Tuesday at the Oxford Crown Court, Bracknell News and the Oxford Mail reported.

According to the Oxford Mail, Sheen is already serving a 17-year sentence for multiple thefts, including ATM burglaries. It's unclear how much additional time he may face behind bars as a result of his guilty plea.

Other men charged with golden toilet theft

Three other men were arrested in connection to the golden toilet theft, the Crown Prosecution Service said in November.

The three men and their charges include:

• Michael Jones, 38, one count of burglary
• Fred Doe, 35, one count of conspiracy to transfer criminal property
• Bora Guccuk, 39, one count of conspiracy to transfer criminal property

Jones, Doe and Guccuk have pleaded not guilty and are set for trial on Feb. 24, 2025.

Stolen toilet was part of art exhibition

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan created the piece, titling it “America.” It was part of an art installation at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of former prime minister Winston Churchill.

“We knew there was huge interest in the Maurizio Cattelan contemporary art exhibition, with many set to come and enjoy the installations,” Blenheim Palace tweeted the day of the incident. “It’s therefore a great shame an item so precious has been taken.”

Organizers predicted at least 6,000 people would visit to use the fully functioning toilet. The toilet was also on display in 2016 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where at least 100,000 people used it.

Thames Valley Detective Inspector Jess Milne said at the time that the toilet was connected to the palace’s plumbing system, so the theft caused damage and flooding. Police also speculated that the burglars used at least two vehicles to steal the toilet.

Italian artist’s work was the subject of previous headlines

Cattelan, the artist who created the piece, also created the duct-taped banana that made its rounds online in 2019 on display at Art Basel in Miami.

The piece, a banana duct-taped to a wall, is one of many worth over $100,000. Artist David Datuna ate the banana in 2019 while it was on display in Miami.

"I love Maurizio Cattelan's artwork and I really love this installation," he later wrote as he posted about the ordeal online. "It’s very delicious." 

Last year, a version of the piece was on display at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. A student, reportedly an art major, ate the banana because he had skipped breakfast and was hungry.

Contributing: Camille Fine, Doug Stanglin , and Hannah Yasharoff

Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY's NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia – the 757. Follow her on Twitter at @SaleenMartin or email her at [email protected] .

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What to Know About the Bird Flu Outbreak in Dairy Cows

The infections, which include one associated human case, add another worrying wrinkle to a global outbreak that has devastated bird and marine mammal populations.

By Emily Anthes and Apoorva Mandavilli

An unusual bird flu outbreak in dairy cows has now affected at least 13 herds in six states, according to federal and state officials. These infections represent the first time that a highly pathogenic bird flu virus, which is often fatal in birds, has been detected in U.S. cattle.

At least one person in Texas has been diagnosed with bird flu after having contact with dairy cows presumed to be infected, state officials said on Monday. The patient’s primary symptom was conjunctivitis; the individual is being treated with an antiviral drug and is recovering, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The virus has been identified as the same version of H5N1, an influenza subtype, that is circulating in North American birds. Scientists have not found evidence that the virus has acquired the mutations it would need to spread easily between humans, officials have said.

The risk to the general public remains low, experts said. But these developments add a worrying dimension to an avian influenza outbreak that has already affected millions of birds and sea mammals worldwide.

Here’s what to know:

What is bird flu?

Bird flu, or avian influenza, is a group of flu viruses that are primarily adapted to birds. The particular virus in these new cases, called H5N1, was first identified in 1996 in geese in China, and in people in Hong Kong in 1997.

In 2020, a new, highly pathogenic form of H5N1 emerged in Europe and spread quickly around the world. In the United States, it has affected more than 82 million farmed birds , the worst bird flu outbreak in U.S. history.

Since the virus was first identified, sporadic cases have been found in people in other countries. But a vast majority resulted from prolonged, direct contact with birds.

H5N1 does not yet seem to have adapted to spread efficiently among people, experts say.

How did cows get bird flu?

Cows were not thought to be a species at high risk.

“The fact that they are susceptible — the virus can replicate, can make them sick — that is something I wouldn’t have predicted,” said Richard Webby, an influenza virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

But this year, reports of sick cows began to emerge in Texas and New Mexico. Dead birds were also found on some of these farms, and laboratory testing confirmed that some cows were infected with bird flu. (In Texas, three symptomatic cats also tested positive for the virus, the Texas Animal Health Commission said in an email. Feline infections are not new; cats are known to be susceptible to the virus, which they can pick up when they hunt or eat infected birds.)

It is not entirely clear how the virus found its way into cattle. But one likely route, several experts said, is that infected wild birds, which shed the virus in their feces, saliva and other secretions, contaminated the cows’ food or water.

How have cows been affected?

Although the virus is often fatal in birds, it appears to be causing relatively mild illness in cows.

“It’s not killing animals, and they seem to be recovering,” said Dr. Joe Armstrong, a veterinarian and cattle production expert at the University of Minnesota Extension. Last week, the U.S.D.A. said that there were no plans to “depopulate,” or kill, affected herds, which is the standard procedure when poultry flocks are infected with the virus.

The disease is primarily affecting older cows, which have developed symptoms that include a loss of appetite, a low-grade fever and a significant drop in milk production. The milk that the cows do produce is often “thick and discolored,” according to Texas officials . The virus has also been found in unpasteurized milk samples collected from sick cows.

It is not yet clear whether the bird flu virus is the sole cause of all the symptoms and illnesses that have been reported, experts cautioned.

How widespread is the problem?

It’s unclear. On Tuesday, the U.S.D.A. said that its National Veterinary Services Laboratories had confirmed bird flu infections in 12 herds to date : seven in Texas, two in Kansas and one each in Michigan, New Mexico and Idaho. On Wednesday, Ohio’s Department of Agriculture announced that it had also received confirmation of an affected herd from the national laboratories.

So far, the virus has been found only in dairy cows and not in beef cattle.

But because cows are not routinely tested for bird flu, and the illness has been relatively mild, there could be other infected herds that have escaped detection, experts said.

And the movement of cattle between states could transport the virus to new locations. The affected dairy in Michigan had recently imported cows from an infected herd in Texas. When the cows were transported, the animals were not displaying any symptoms. The farm in Idaho had also recently imported cows from an affected state, Idaho officials said .

How is it spreading?

That is a key, and still unanswered, question. It is possible that the infected cows are picking up the virus independently, especially if shared food or water sources have been contaminated.

A more worrisome possibility, however, is that the virus is spreading from cow to cow. On Friday, the U.S.D.A. noted that “transmission between cattle cannot be ruled out.”

Several scientists said that they would be surprised if there were not some degree of cow-to-cow transmission. “How else could it move so rapidly?” said Dr. Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

If the virus can spread easily between cows, that could lead to larger, more sustained outbreaks. It would also give the virus more opportunities to adapt to its new mammalian hosts, increasing the risk that it acquires mutations that make it more dangerous to people.

What do we know about the human case?

This is only the second case of H5N1 bird flu in people in the United States; the first was in 2022 .

The patient worked directly with sick dairy cows, said Lara M. Anton, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. “We have tested around a dozen symptomatic people who work at dairies, and only the one person has tested positive” for the virus, she said in an email on Monday.

A sample of virus from the patient displayed one mutation that allows it infect people more easily. But to be capable of spreading from one person to another, the virus must acquire several additional mutations — not an easy evolutionary feat.

The C.D.C. is working with state health departments to monitor other people who may have been in contact with infected birds and animals, the agency said on Monday. It also urged people to avoid exposure to sick or dead birds and animals, and to raw milk, feces or other potentially contaminated materials.

How will officials know if bird flu adapts to spread between people?

Analyzing the genetic sequence of the virus from infected birds, cows and people can reveal whether H5N1 has acquired mutations that help it spread among people.

Scientists have been closely tracking infections in birds and sea mammals and, now, cows. So far, the virus does not seem to have the ability to spread efficiently between people.

In 2012, scientists showed that H5N1 was able to spread through air between ferrets — a popular model for studying transmission of respiratory viruses among people — after acquiring five mutations.

A sample of bird flu isolated from a Chilean man last year had two mutations that indicate adaptation to infecting mammals. But those mutations have previously been seen without the virus evolving further to spread between people, experts said.

Is it safe to consume dairy products?

Federal officials have stressed that commercially processed milk remains safe to drink. Dairies are required to keep milk from sick animals out of the human food supply, and milk sold across state lines must be pasteurized, a process in which the milk is heated to kill potential pathogens. Pasteurization “has continually proven to inactivate bacteria and viruses, like influenza, in milk,” the Food and Drug Administration said in a new online guide to milk safety .

Dr. Gail Hansen, a veterinary public health expert and independent consultant, agreed that the risk was probably “very low.” She added, “I would not want people to stop drinking milk because of it.”

But the possibility could not be entirely ruled out, she said, expressing some concern that federal officials had been “overconfident in the face of so many unknowns.” If cows are shedding virus into their milk before they show signs of illness, that milk could potentially find its way into the commercial supply, she said. And different pathogens may require different pasteurization temperatures and durations; the specific conditions required to inactivate this particular virus remained unclear, Dr. Hansen said.

The risk of being infected by the virus by consuming unpasteurized, or raw, dairy products is unknown, the F.D.A. said. Raw milk is known to pose a variety of potential disease risks beyond avian influenza.

Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic. More about Emily Anthes

Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter focused on science and global health. She was a part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic. More about Apoorva Mandavilli