White-Washing the Fence

Posted on March 10, 2013

Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer first influenced me when I was 12 or 13. After reading about Tom and Becky being lost in the cave and seeing it depicted on a TV movie, I decided I ought to be prepared. I began carrying a lighter or matches in my purse and my jacket pockets. I haven’t been lost in a cave (yet), but I have enabled quite a few smokers over the years.

I read the full text of Tom Sawyer only once as an adult, when I was teaching a Children’s Literature class several years ago. I was struck by Twain’s understanding of economics. The entire book seems to play with the concepts of supply and demand.

When there’s too much of Tom, he is not appreciated.

When Tom is believed dead, everyone loves him.

The best example, however, is whitewashing the fence. Aunt Polly assigns Tom the chore of whitewashing the fence, and Tom complies begrudgingly. However, when Ben comes along and says that he is going swimming, Tom acts as if whitewashing the fence is much more fun. When Ben asks for a turn whitewashing, Tom says “no” because

“Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence …. I reckon there ain’t one boy in  a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done.”

Tom is a master. He creates a world in which whitewashing the fence is an uncommon pleasure and the supply of boys is so large that only the luckiest and most careful of boys will have the opportunity to whitewash.

Needless to say, Tom takes a boatload of treasures off his friends as they pay him in order to have a turn whitewashing the fence.

And the narrator explains, just in case we readers are too stupid to figure it out:

“In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing,

it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain….

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and

Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

I think about this point regularly. I wrote about education in such a way for Marywood’s student newspaper a couple years ago, with the reminder that reading and writing are regularly forbidden for oppressed people; we need to remember this fact to help us appreciate reading and writing as gifts rather than burdens.

I regularly have work I do not want to do. Part of the reason I do not want to do it is because it is work. I am obliged to do it.

Often I procrastinate until the due date is so close that I cannot put it off any longer, and I go ahead and get my work done.

But sometimes I play Tom Sawyer. Sometimes when I have some work that must be done and other work that is not immediate or even completely necessary, I use the less-pressing work to avoid the necessary work. Really! The less-necessary or less-immediate work becomes play.

That’s what I’m doing right now. I have done a lot of work over the last week because it has been spring break. I have also done a lot of goofing off over the last week because it has been spring break. And now I have three writing tasks on my “to do” list. Writing this blog post is not one of them.

I am writing for pleasure to avoid the writing I must do today. And I will eventually do the work that must be done, but I will see if I can somehow make it feel more like play than like work. I will see how well I can channel my inner-Tom Sawyer.

White-washing the fence is connected to MOOCs, too. But I will write about that on another day. Most likely, it will be another day when I’m avoiding work that I’m obliged to complete.