Notes from Morungole (Part I)

Intro — The MSU gambit

A passage in one of my favourite classics “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain goes something like this:

On a beautiful Saturday Aunt Polly gives Tom the unenviable chore of painting her fence. After Tom unsuccessfully fails to trade off his task with Jim whose was fetching water, he solemnly embarks on painting the fence. Along comes Ben Rogers, chomping on a juicy apple, on his way to a productive day of sun-filled playtime. Tom pretends to be wholly absorbed in his task. When Ben teases him about having to work, Tom contends that whitewashing is a privilege, and one that Aunt Polly would only trust to him. Ben begs Tom to let him try, which Tom does, but only after Ben agrees to hand over the rest of his apple to Tom.

Tom plays this trick on other boys for the rest of the day. He amasses all sorts of treasure — a dead rat on a string, marbles, a chalk fragment, and more — and gets the boys to do so much work for him that the fence has three coats by quitting time.

To catalogue this episode, the author notes:

“Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.”

This analogy is illustrative. MSU, the wily and clever Tom; making us covet thin air, hostile temperatures, thorny bush-passes and uncertain terrain. This difficult thing, because it is NOT obligatory, consumes us, and we crave it. MSU has us hooked.

However, the story isn’t quite complete. It only presents the young boys as gullible marks subject to Tom’s sophisticated manipulation. But what if indeed, the boys derive true pleasure from performing this task. Notwithstanding the trickery that may have led them into it, there is satisfaction to be gained by voluntary submission unto difficulty.

Like Tom, the MSU gambit is effective. What a privilege they have given us, that we get to Keep Climbing.

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