'You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you only have to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.'
WH Auden in Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, p.87.
