A Piece of Work

People often seem to me glib when they say things like, “Everyone is unique.” I look around at the humanity around me and I’m not much more impressed by their uniqueness than I am when snow is falling to think that every snowflake is unlike any other. “All those flakes adds up to it’s snowing,” is more what I see.

But I recall a discovery I felt I’d made about people, back in my early to mid 20s. (That was a time when I was making a lot of discoveries.) Each time I felt that I really got to see someone fully, I saw in every instance that the person was something rather immense and complex: each seemed psychologically composed of a unique set of elements put together in a unique way, giving each a unique way of responding to the world.

It was a perception I found moving then, and that I find harder now to achieve. But I trust that I saw something real. And important.

Important, because what it meant was to see that a human being is something substantial. Each of us begins with a remarkably elaborate human inheritance, and then, throughout our lives, experience interacts with who we already are to make us who we become. Each person represents an achievement of sorts, as the human creature does its best to deal with what it has to deal with. Not all succeed equally, but in most people, I think, there is something one might reasonably see as “an admirable achievement”—or, if not admirable, at least an understandable outcome of who that person was and what that person had to deal with.

A human being is, in that sense, quite literally “a piece of work.” The expression once conveyed something like a work of art—something wonderfully wrought. Now we generally use it with distaste or disdain. But there’s another sense in which the phrase seems apt: each of us has done a great deal of work, in dealing with what life has required of us, to become the particular “piece of work” that we are.

“Every human life is precious” is another of those cliché-sounding “sampler” philosophies that I often register as a kind of sentimentality I don’t want to engage in. But then there’s the sense that human beings—with their amazing bodies, and complex consciousness—are something extraordinary in the world. We get shaped at a level of complexity and elaboration beyond creatures that don’t have our kind of psychological magnitude and flexibility.

There’s a moment in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven when a young man has just killed a man which, despite his previous bravado, he’d never done before. He is stunned—traumatized—by the reality of what he has done. The Clint Eastwood character, a man with an outlaw past, says to him: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” It’s not a candle being blown out. The human life has a magnitude.

The human creature added some magnitude to the domain of Life-on-Earth. Our species added some previously missing elements to that realm by virtue of having a much richer realm of consciousness. Every human infant born into the world emerges, like the young of other creatures with rich experiential lives, but also in the uniquely human way of creatures whose imagination makes them capable of building new worlds.

But if extraordinary richness and complexity are to be seen as making our lives “precious,” what’s special about the human is built upon the foundations of life that are also mind-blowing in their richness and complexity. Even down to the level of a single cell—with its intricate organization down to the molecular level.

That single cell — something that Life-on-Earth had to labor for billions of years to create —became a rich foundation making even richer forms of life possible. A real piece of work.