In 1974, the year I turned nineteen, I took my first real job in the goods store of a railway station in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland. I was pleased to be off my parents’ hands, but uneasy in my position. The tiny goods office was an anthill of activity, with a constant flow of locomotive engineers, lorry drivers, forklift operators, milesmen, checkers, shunters, and ­inspectors—­muscular, perspiring males who carried their ill-kempt clipboards with nonchalant disdain. And then there were the clerks, of whom I was one, nominally supervising the chaos but, in reality, remote from the dirty and dangerous work of packing, stacking, counting, booking, charging, ­discharging, wagon-decoupling, gantry-unloading, and cleaning up ­after pilferage and damage-in-transit. Our hands were as soft and clean as our speech when we joined in with the dirty talk of our “­subordinates.”

I had grown up in a world in which the division of labor still derived from biology: Women bore children and men did hard labor of a different sort. I was aware that some men worked in offices, yet I couldn’t shake off the feeling that the jobs we clerks did were dispensable. If I went AWOL for a month, there might have been a tailback of paperwork, but no crisis. If the signalman failed to show, the trains would be left hooting for the road at the outer home. Truth to tell, in a different part of my head, I felt a little superior to all these bustling, grumbling, swearing men, but still there was this unease. I did not grasp that I was experiencing the psychic disintegration of the culturally displaced, the alienation of those unaware they have been born at the end of an epoch.

With both my parents emerging from long lines of small farmers, I was the first male from either side to end up in sedentary work. My father had in his twenties moved inland from County Sligo to take a job as a mechanic. Two of my uncles spent their lives building the motorways of England. Two more served in WWII, one with the British and the other with the U.S. army. All these men had made their livings from physical exertion, strength, and sweat. They had remarkable talents for making and fixing things, for using their hands and their senses to intervene in the world in real ways and leave concrete traces behind. My father was a self-taught carpenter, electrician, draughtsman, and mechanic. He had green fingers and calloused palms; my hands remain as crushed velvet. He once built a wheelbarrow entirely out of wood, including the wheel. If you had placed it in a gallery and run a red rope around it, the world would have called it art. I grew up with all this, doing the donkey work on some of his horticultural projects, lying on the tarmacadam beside him on a Sunday, handing him wrenches and gauges as he did battle on his back with passive-aggressive internal combustion engines.

Now, here I was, a pen pusher for life, but still unaware of what that might mean. I understood that my parents were trying to boot me up from the stratum of society they belonged to. Education was the thing, and education meant stuff you learned from books rather than at a bench or atop a ladder.

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