On Household

According to the industrial formula, the ideal human residence (from the Latin residere, "to sit back" or "remain sitting") is one on which the residers do not work. The house is built, equipped, decorated, and provisioned by other people, by strangers.  In it, the married couple practice as few as possible of the disciplines of household or homestead. Their domestic labor consists principally, of buying things, putting things away, and throwing things away, but it is understood that it is, "best" to have even those jobs done by an "inferior" person, and the ultimate industrial ideal is a "home" in which everything, would be done by pushing buttons. In such a "home," a married couple are mates, sexually, legally, and socially, but they are not helpmates; they do nothing useful either together or for each other. According to the ideal, work should be done away from home. When such spouses say to each other, "I will love you forever," the meaning of their words is seriously impaired by their circumstances; they are speaking in the presence of so little that they have done and made. Their history together is essentially placeless; it has no visible or tangible incarnation. They have only themselves in view.

Wendell - Men and Women In Search of Common Ground

I have to decline Wendell's assumption that this is a condition of the industrial age.  The industrial age makes this lifestyle available to all you desire it but it is not the progenitor of the thinking behind it.  This has always been our desire as long as history itself.  The taking and owning of slaves to do your work is the equivalent of major appliance shopping at Sears.  If only they'd had consumer reports at the slave block.  Life would have been so much easier for those poor old timers.    Alas.

Hmm, but it continues. 

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, “mine” is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as “ours.”

This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. Such a household economy may employ the disciplines and skills of housewifery, of carpentry and other trades of building and maintenance, of gardening and other branches of subsistence agriculture, and even of woodlot management and wood-cutting. It may also involve a “cottage industry” of some kind, such as a small literary enterprise.

Wendell - Feminisim, the Body and the Machine

Damn you Berry and your small literary enterprise and your housewifery and carpentry and all of it.  I think even in the moments of achievment, such as the first tiny, dirty vegetable from the garden in July to the finishing touchs on a new bathroom we've sweated and bleed for for two years, we're still stuck in a cycle of macroeconomics that is terribly difficult to break from if only because land itself is astronomically priced and without dirt none of this is really worth talking about.  I'll have to explore more on that later.  Perhaps I'm being over negative because Berry, often enough, strikes nerves and convicts conscience with his measures and presents for myself a world that is both beautiful and dark.  It seems to be something unachievable.  Is this bad?