The third Monday in February is a holiday that nobody quite celebrates. The bank is closed. The post office is closed. The schools take it or they don't, depending on how many bad-weather days they have burned. The furniture stores have a sale, which is how most of the country finds out the day has come around again, and the sale is always for mattresses, for reasons nobody has ever explained to me. It is Washington's birthday on the federal calendar and Lincoln's on the old school-wall calendars, and somewhere in the last century the two ran together into a Monday off that honors, vaguely, everybody who has ever held the job.
The plant does not take it. You knew that. But the reason is worth more than a shift schedule, and it goes back a long way past Washington.
We do not remember these men for what they were capable of. We remember them for what they did. Washington was a surveyor and a farmer and could have stayed one. Lincoln split rails and read law by whatever light there was and could have stayed a country lawyer. Nobody puts a face on a mountain for what a man might have done. The holiday is about the doing. It is about the years in office, the actual work, the being-at-it. And that, it turns out, is a very old distinction, and there is a word for it, and the word is the one this whole town runs on.
Energy.
You use it a hundred times a week without thinking about it. Energy prices. Energy sector. The energy corridor. Energy drinks, God help us. It is the word on the side of the trucks going in the gate and the word in the name of half the companies whose tanks you can see from the bridge. And it is a Greek word, and it was made up, on purpose, by one man, about twenty-three hundred years ago, and he did not mean by it anything like what we mean.
The man was Aristotle. He was a doctor's son from the north of Greece who came to Athens to study and stayed to think, and who wrote, among a great many other things, a long and difficult book about what it means for something to be. Somewhere in the middle of that book he ran into a problem that the language did not have a word for, and so he built one. He took ergon, which means work, or a deed, or the thing a thing does, and put en in front of it, which means in. Energeia. Being in work. Being at work. Actuality, the translators usually say, but that is a cold word, and the Greek is warmer than that. It means the thing happening. The doing, as opposed to the could-do.
Because that was the problem. Aristotle had noticed that everything in the world exists in two ways at once. There is what it is right now, and there is what it could be. A block of marble is a block of marble, and it is also, in some real sense, a statue that has not been carved yet. Hermes is in the wood, he said, meaning the carving is in the log, waiting. A pile of bricks is a house in the same way. A seed is a tree. A boy is a man. A man who knows how to build is a builder even when he is asleep, but he is a builder in a different way when he is standing on the roof with a hammer in his hand. For the first kind of being he used the word dunamis, which we turn into dynamic and dynamite. Potential. Capacity. What could be. For the second kind, the roof and the hammer, he made the new word. Energeia. What is.
Now hold that next to a barrel of oil.
A barrel is dunamis. It is a steel drum of could-be. It could be gasoline or jet fuel or the asphalt on Garth Road or the plastic in the phone in your hand. It could be heat in a furnace or motion in a truck or a rocket's first stage lifting off a pad in Florida. Sitting in the tank, it is none of those. It is capacity. And when a physicist says the barrel contains so many million units of energy, he is using Aristotle's word to mean exactly the opposite of what Aristotle meant by it. He is using it for the potential. The stored thing. The block of marble.
That flip happened only about two hundred years ago, and it happened in two steps. For most of two millennia the word stayed a philosopher's word. Then, in 1807, an English doctor and physicist named Thomas Young, who also showed that light travels in waves and did some of the first real work on reading the Rosetta Stone, needed a name for the quantity you get when you multiply a moving body's mass by the square of its speed. He reached for the Greek and took energy. And notice: Young's energy was still Aristotle's. It belonged to a body in motion, a thing happening, a cannonball in the air and not in the rack. The second step came a half century later, when a Scottish engineer named Rankine, working out how a steam engine turns heat into motion, saw that the raised weight and the stretched spring and the coal in the bunker held something that could become Young's energy, and needed a name for that too. He called it potential energy. Which is to say he took Aristotle's word for what is and stapled Aristotle's word for what could be onto the front of it, and two words that had been built to be opposites became one phrase. Within a generation the phrase had swallowed everything: the heat in steam, the strain in a spring, the pull of a raised weight, and, once people worked out that all of these were the same thing in different clothes, the great law that the total of it never changes. Energy became the name for the quantity that is conserved. It became the thing in the tank.
And that is fine. Physics needed a word and it took one, and a lot of good has come from it. But something was lost in the taking, and this town, of all places, is where you can still see what it was.
Go stand at the fence on a weekday morning. What you are looking at, through the chain link, is not a store of energy, though there are tank farms in it. What you are looking at, in Aristotle's sense, is energeia itself: a place where the could-be is turned into the is, continuously, on purpose, by people. Crude comes in the pipe as pure potential, a thick dark liquid that could become a thousand things, and the plant makes it become some of them. The furnace is the potential of the fuel turning into the actuality of heat. The tower is the potential of the crude turning into the actuality of the cuts, the lighter ones climbing and the heavier ones falling, each finding the tray where it belongs. The operator walking the unit is the potential of a trained man turning into the actuality of a plant that is running right. Nothing in there is being stored. Everything in there is being done.
That is the operator's whole job, if you want to put it in Greek. The night-shift man on the tower — the same composite man who turns up in these essays, no one person — has the training and the years and the certifications, and all of that is dunamis. It is what he could do. At three in the morning, when a reading drifts and he catches it and opens a valve a quarter turn and watches the number come back, that is energeia. That is the being-at-work that Aristotle built the word for. It does not live in the manual. It does not live in the badge. It lives in the quarter turn.
I think Aristotle would have liked a refinery, and I think it would have puzzled him too. He thought the highest kind of energeia was the kind that is complete in every moment, that does not build toward something else but is already what it is for. Seeing, he said, is like that. You are not seeing in order to have seen; the seeing is the whole point, every second. Living is like that. Thinking is like that. Building a house is not, because the building is for the house, and when the house is done the building stops. A continuous process is a strange thing by that measure. It is building that never gets to the house. The plant makes fuel in order for the fuel to be burned in order for the truck to move in order for the food to get to the store in order for the town to eat in order to go to work in order to make fuel. There is no moment where the doing is done. Which either means the plant is the least Aristotelian thing on earth, or the most. I lean toward the most. A thing that is only ever at work, and never at rest, and never finished, is a thing that is all energeia and no dunamis. It is pure being-at-work. It is the word made steel.
There is one more turn to this, and then I will stop. Aristotle came close to saying, in that book and in another one about the soul, that for a living thing its being-at-work is not a description of its life but the life itself. What you are is what you are doing. A president is the presidency he did. A builder is the building. A town is its shifts. Take away the doing and the potential is still there, in the marble, in the crude, in the man asleep in his truck in the parking lot before the gate opens, but the thing itself is gone. Which is why the plant does not take the third Monday off. Not because the company is hard, though it may be. Because a continuous process that stops does not rest. It turns back into a block of marble.
The mattress sale will be over by Tuesday. The bank will open. The school buses will run again up Bayway Drive past the park, and nobody will have thought once about the man who made the word that is on the side of every truck in town. That is all right. He would not have wanted a holiday either. He would have wanted a morning like this one, gray and cool, with the flare lit at the end of the road, and a few thousand people walking through a gate to turn what could be into what is.
Up on the tower, the operator finishes his round. He writes the number down. Then he stands at the rail for a minute with the whole thing at work underneath him, humming, the way it hums every morning, and does not have a word for it, and does not need one.