The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Despite being in one of the most remote places on Earth, McMurdo is still very connected to the outside world. There’s Internets and TVs all over the place, and there’s even a few radio stations. Whenever I’m getting in a little Truck Time, I like to switch on NPR and see what’s happening in the outside world. Today I was treated to a wonderful segment on Talk of the Nation (from back in June 2009?) about a book entitled “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Alain de Botton. It really struck a chord with me, and I wanted to share an excerpt (mainly for my own record keeping).
If a Martian came to earth and tried to understand what humans do from reading most literature published today, he would come away with the extraordinary impression that we mostly spend our time falling in love — and occasionally, murdering one another. But of course, what we really do is go to work – and yet this “work” is unseen, it is literally invisible and it is so in part because it is not represented in art. If it does appear in consciousness, it does so via the business pages of newspapers, it does so as an economic phenomenon, rather than as a broader human phenomenon.
The modern mystery of how things are made
Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and source of almost every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned. They would have been familiar with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has grown ever more obscure. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the production and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.
The world is covered in factories and warehouses, but it is impossible for the lay person to go into them or even approach them. Despite their importance, they have no desire to advertise themselves to the public. In business parks, they are spread out across sites of determined blandness marked by gentle gradients, ornamental trees and expanses of preternaturally green grass.
When we think of tourist destinations, we don’t think of the places of work. Why, endowed as they are with both practical importance and emotional resonance, do cargo ships, port facilities, airport warehouses, storage tanks, refineries and assembly plants go unnoticed, except by those immediately involved in their operations?
Finding beauty in the industrial world
In an essay entitled “The Poet,” published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty.
It was Emerson’s strategy to lead his readers by example, to encourage their evolving sense of what might be attractive by demonstrating that he himself, a trustworthy guardian of high culture, was capable of recognizing the appeal of a signal box and a chimney stack, and that a range of hitherto unlikely objects could therefore be safe for all to love.
The exception to the rule: Trainspotters
There is, of course, one particular kind of person who breaks the normal rules: I am thinking of spotters of ships, lorries planes and trains, the kind who give up weekends to admire the giant moving parts of our mechanized world. Whatever their inarticulacies, the spotters are appropriately alive to some of the most astonishing aspects of our time.
They know what it is about our world that would detain a Martian or a child. They take pleasure in sensing their smallness and ignorance next to the expansive intelligence of the modern collective mind. Standing beside a docked ship, their heads thrown back to gaze at its steel turrets disappearing into the sky, they enter into a state of silent, satisfied wonder, like pilgrims before the towers of Chartres. Nor are they ashamed to seem eccentric when their curiosity demands it.
Take note of our new kind of landscape
The spotter’s pastime harks back to the habits of pre-modern travelers, who, upon arriving in a new country, were apt to express particular curiosity about its granaries, aqueducts, harbors and workshops, feeling that the observation of work could be as stimulating as anything on a stage or chapel wall – a relief from a contemporary view which tightly associates tourism with play and therefore steers us away from an interest in aluminum foundries and sewage treatment plants in favor of the trumpeted pleasures of musicals and waxwork museums.
How ignorant most of us are by contrast, surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasp; we who know nothing about gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy only as a set of numbers, who think — even now — that it is only about money, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves closer acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable. How much we might learn from the spotters at the ends of piers and runways.
Restoring work to the human world
At a time when recession is reminding us how badly we need work, it should be artists who teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology. One can hope for a day when photographs of electricity conductors might hang over dining tables and when someone might write a libretto for an opera set in the sales office of a packaging firm. We need art that could function for our times a little like those eighteenth-century cityscapes which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace – inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place which work accords each of us within the human hive.
Finding meaning at work
We need an art that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, despite the current economic mayhem, with the principal source of life’s meaning.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is the new book by acclaimed philosopher Alain de Botton. Despite the fact that work is the central part of almost every man’s life, it has become invisible in our culture. In his book, De Botton makes a case for work — as opposed to leisure — as a source of inspiration for art and celebration.
During this period of economic turmoil, employment is on everyone’s mind. Maybe it’s time for us to re-consider how work fits into our visions of happiness and life balance.
