In his novel Germinal, the French writer Émile Zola describes how he and the miners who served as his guides were 150 feet below the ground when Zola noticed an enormous workhorse, a beautiful Percheron, pulling a sled piled with coal through a tunnel. Zola asked, 'How do you get that animal in and out of the mine every day?' At first the miners thought he was joking. Then they realised he was serious, and one of them said, 'Mr Zola, don't you understand? That horse comes down here once, when he's a colt, barely more than a foal, and still able to fit into the buckets that bring us down here. That horse grows up down here. He grows blind down here after a year or two, from the lack of light. He hauls coal down here until he can't haul it anymore, and then he dies down here, and his bones are buried down here.'
As you read those words, it makes the hair on your arms stand on end because you realise that the horse is a metaphor for the miners, indeed for so many workers, who trot along in their work, blind to their real purpose in life.
If you aren't blind yet, do yourself a favour and read the book or watch the movie:
