Henry de Montherlant, Work Well Done (June Solstice)
"A knight cannot take back his word, though he may have given it to a dog. Code of the samurai."
Henry de Montherlant
Work Well Done
From June Solstice
Empires are falling. Disorder in the world is at its height. It strikes a man in his property, in his future, in his reason for being; it threatens his life; it threatens the lives of beings who are dear to him.
In these conditions, that man spends several minutes searching out which word would be more precise and more expressive than the one that first came to his pen, — for the man of whom we speak is a writer. He spends an hour going to the public library to consult there a special dictionary that will tell him the exact usage of some other word. He writes to a friend to ask him what the true sense, in Latin, is of the root of some other vocable.
During this time, empires are falling. And the man does not know if there will even exist a world where his book will be able to see the light of day.
I even knew a man who, setting out to mobilization for the front, minutely did that work in the train packed with soldiers. And who did so later to the din of bombs and shrapnel. And at which he sneered, when he said it. And who believed, believes, and will always believe that he was right to act so.
And what I say of the writer holds true for the man or the boy who works a field, who forges a tool, who touches up a cast, who paints a sign. It is a matter of work well done.