“Big mistake to correct a big wrong decision.”



Little by little, people who spend a lot of time alone in their work often begin to resemble the shape of their destinies. This is something you’ll recognize on the bodies of those involved with the intellectual as well as the manual professions. The nature of the work isn’t so important here as its social context: scholars, novelists, gardeners, prisoners, freelance web developers, house cleaners and some painters are today’s most prominent examples of occupations vulnerable to this kind of warping. The body matures, and at some point can be fully identified in relief of a profession. Getting there might be called something like making a deal. So a freelance web developer becomes what he is called, and his shape is influenced by a number of possible things.

On some, the change might at first be innocuous and subtle enough—an elongated neck, for example: as common today on the house cleaner as it is on the Byzantine historian. As time is elaborated, however, often too are the changes. There are those, for instance, who are disfigured in violent manners, learning to walk with a damaged gait or sleep in unnatural positions. Others, even less lucky perhaps, are changed in more discreet ways. A piece of wet clay in hands of sober intellect but unclear intent, time works on these souls like a poem works on a curious mind. It could come to express itself in a subtle deepening of the voice, or the slow thinning of the wrists.



Boško Blagojević
Holland, November 2010