the grass is always browner on the other side

johneffay points out that exploited factory workers have it much tougher than I did when I said I was exhausted after walking around Venice for 3 or 4 days looking at art. Touché.

And here’s someone who had an even tougher row to hoe:

“Prisoner: Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia

From now on I was part of the ‘BUR.’ That is the Maximum Security Barrack for inveterate criminals, who are considered worse than scrap… We worked in a laundry, where we washed bloody linen, brought from the front: camouflage coats and forage caps. I’m sure that all these things would wash much better if rinsed in a river somewhere near the enemy lines. Why transport them for six months and four thousand kilometers, so we could wash them in cold water, and without soap? The only goal was probably mockery. To get 400 grams of bread we had to wash 300 pieces of bloody, linen dried into solid lumps or two thousand—yes, two thousand!—forage caps, or one hundred camouflage coats. For all of that we got one cap of liquid soap. The coats were particularly nightmarish. When wet, they became solid like iron plates, and one couldn’t get the dried blood out with an ax.”

Much harder than walking around an art show, for sure. My fatigue last night was pretty trivial by comparison with the horrors of the Gulag, no question.

None of us with liberty and enough food to eat should ever say that we are tired, hungry, ill, or unhappy. Others will always have it worse.

In the future I will try to emulate johneffay’s ascetic stoicism more closely.