Work

And here's some random insights from our man Alain:

I felt the awkwardness of having to look up to rocket engineers and technicians
as our ancestors might once have venerated their gods. These specialists were
unlikely and troubling objects of admiration compared with the night sky and the
mountains. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least
offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made
achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more
blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to
wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no
more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered
and morally troubling fellow human beings.

. . .

I was stuck by how impoverished ordinary language can be by contrast [with
equations employed to determine the force of gravity at work on a telegraph
cable], requiring its user to arrange inordinate numbers of words in tottering
and unstable piles in order to communicate meanings infinitely more basic than
anything related to an electrical network. I found myself wisheding that the
rest of mankind would follow the engineers' example and agree on a series of
symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and
often painful psychological states - a code which might help us to feel less
tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and
silent exchanges of equation.

. . .

Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done: it seems not so
much taboo as unlikely. Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything
other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and
we should be grateful to it for precisely that reason, for allowing us to mingle
ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of
our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful
lightness, as mere intellectual propositions, while we travel to Paris to sell
engine oil.

De Botton concludes:

Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect
bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our
immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it
will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired,
it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.

I admire his courageous honesty. But I am sad for him - for, by God's grace, I know that there is more to life and to death.


Quotes from de Botton, The Pleasures, 168, 206, 324, 326.