The Great Work
Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas
A Day to Advance Your Magnum Opus
About The Great Work
Let’s talk about it, that thing that idles in the background but occasionally surges forward and demands your attention. Your great work. Not your weekend side hustle, but your opus: sprawling, elevator-pitch defying, maybe even foolish. The kind of project that could devour you and require a two-year sabbatical just to begin. It’s the novel about retired janitors you are definitely not writing. The laser-light opera based on Clash of the Titans that no one asked for (shut up and take my money). The import-export business that deals exclusively in Art Nouveau glass. The point of the Great Work is total transformation, about testing how far you can go. Maybe you’ve already begun, or maybe it’s just a file on your desktop named ideas.docx. It does not matter. Today is the day you take one real step. Outline the chapters, buy the domain, file the patent, whatever brings it closer to real. Sure, you might spend your final days apologizing for its existence when society deems you a monster. But more likely is that you’ll die alone. (Just kidding!) Seriously, even a small step today will lift your spirits for weeks.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Name your magnum opus out loud. Write it down somewhere safe. You don’t have to tell anyone—just acknowledge it.
(B) Recommended
Create a plan: a chapter list, a sketch, a roadmap, or a Pinterest board. Schedule an imaginary sabbatical. Look up grant deadlines you’ll never apply for. Let yourself dream without mocking it.
(C) High effort
Spend the day working on it. The real thing. One hour, one page, one scene, one stanza, one brushstroke, one pixel. Light a candle if you have to. Play orchestral music. Give it time and real attention.
Inspiration
You may remember Big Plans (Day 57), the wide-open dreaming day. Big Plans had no budget constraints, no implementation plans; its sole purpose was to express the boldest version of what your life could be. The Great Work is the next step: not the whole plan, but the part of it that lives in a document, a draft, a prototype. It is the core deliverable. My thesis is that every ambitious life eventually orbits a central project. Maybe it’s a book, a business plan, a curriculum, a patent, or a manifesto no one else can bring to life. Advancing that project is our task today. You have imagined how your life might change if this thing existed. Now center yourself in the work and get going, or recommit, with full seriousness. Take courage from Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose feast day is today. Aquinas was a Dominican friar, philosopher, and theologian who attempted to explain the entirety of Christian theology in one vast work: the Summa Theologica. It remains unfinished; he died before he could complete it. (It is a monstrously difficult, sprawling work. I’m fairly sure I’ll die before I complete it.) The Great Work demands devotion, or in my case a spreadsheet with forty-two tabs and a title so ambitious it makes you blush.
Adornments
Watch
Andrei Rublev (1966)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s sweeping epic about a 15th-century icon painter in turbulent medieval Russia. The film follows the monk-artist Rublev through war, plague, and crisis of faith as he struggles to create beauty in a brutal world.
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Werner Herzog’s eccentric adventure about obsession and opera in the Amazon. Klaus Kinski stars as Brian Fitzgerald (“Fitzcarraldo”), a man determined to build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle. In his feverish quest, he hatches an impossible plan: haul a 320-ton steamship over a mountain to reach a rich rubber territory that will fund his dream. Total insanity.
Ikiru (1952)
A Japanese masterpiece from Akira Kurosawa, whose title means “To Live.” This poignant film follows Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a mild bureaucrat who, upon learning he is terminally ill, decides to finally do something meaningful with his life.
Listen
A Love Supreme by John Coltrane
Recorded in one late-night session, A Love Supreme flows as a continuous prayer: from the opening fanfare and hypnotic bass mantra (the famous four-note motif) to the closing “Psalm” movement where Coltrane’s tenor sax virtually preaches a wordless sermon.
Read
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville
Ahab drives his crew and ship, Pequod, to the ends of the earth in search of his quarry. Melville’s prose ranges from rhapsodic to encyclopedic: chapters on cetology and whaling lore sit alongside profound meditations on fate, nature, and God.