Stone and Immortality

Reading Response for The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, pages 1-21, and Working by Studs Terkel, pages xlv-xlix.

According to Hannah Arendt, "by their ability to leave nonperishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a 'divine' nature." Is it true? Do people really seek to feel immortal through the things they do or the things they build? I was somewhat skeptical of this claim until I read about Carl Murray Bates, the stonemason, in Terkel's book.

Bates had been a stonemason since he was seventeen years old in the Depression, and had developed a real love for his career over his next forty years on the job. He talks about how much he enjoys working with the stone, what pleasure he receives from building something well, and how much he loves being able to drive by the houses he's built years later and see them still standing firm. What surprised me though, was his comment at the end of his interview : "[It's] immortality as far as we're concerned. Nothin' in this world lasts forever, but did you know that stone - Bedford limestone, they claim - deteriorates one-sixteenth of an inch every hundred years? And it's around four or five inches for a house. So that's gettin' awful close. (Laughs.)" How very profound for this hardworking, honest craftsman to have found an inkling of divine nature in the very stones with which he built. Or is it so profound? Do we find the divine in our work too, as Hannah Arendt suggests?