The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is his whimsical study of people at work and you have to trust me that, despite what appears to be ‘dull’ chapter headings and ‘plain’ photos, this is a charming, funny, illuminating and un-putdownable book.
As ever, de Botton is interested in what most of us might at the very least overlook or at the most choose not to articulate:
I was inspired by the men at the pier to attempt a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principle source of life’s meaning.
In a radio interview he explained his desire to answer the question, ‘what are people doing at 3pm?’ Children, he says, are familiar with the roles of postmen, shopkeepers, etc – but what about all those other jobs? Inspired by Richard Scarry’s children books, What People Do? and the details in a Canaletto, de Botton says he wants to show the “human hive”.
Alongside this de Botton untangles his fascination with wanting to know where everything comes from at a time when we’ve inevitably lost touch with producers and suppliers,
We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of a myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.
Each chapter is an exploration of a different arena among them: biscuit manufacture; logistics; aviation; transmission engineering; accountancy and career counselling – areas which hardly rouse the loins and to which we probably wouldn’t have given much thought unless we’d had direct dealings with individuals in the field, yet through his lyrical, intelligent prose finds de Botton celebrates the beauty and humanity in the most mundane and obscure of activities and he shuffles like Louis Theroux’s awkward understudy, interviewing an eclectic range of committed, specialist, interdependent human beings who occupy themselves daily in ways we thought we didn’t care about, allowing us to walk in their shoes for a few pages and bringing us all infinitesimally closer.
One section of the book is a photo-journal where he traces the journey of a tuna from the moment it’s killed on a fishing boat, (he comments with horror that it’s about the same size as his four year old child), to when, as if by magic, it’s consumed by a child in England.
With the picture of the fisherman clubbing tuna to death burnt into my memory, I recognise that I am now a veteran of the blood-soaked processes lurking behind the labels’ serene photograph of a fishing jetty and an azure sea.
He describes the cargo of a car transporter,
These near identical Hyundai Amicas, smelling of newly minted plastic and synthetic carpet, will bear witness to sandwich lunches and arguments, love making and motorway songs. They will be driven to beauty spots and left to gather leaves in school car parks. A few will kill their owners. To peer inside these untouched vehicles, their seats wrapped in brown paper printed with elegant and cryptic Korean entreaties, is to have a feeling of intruding on an innocence more normally associated with the slumber of newborns.
God, Alain, I sigh shifting uneasily in my pyjamas, my coffee untouched, you are such a master of length! And while he weaves those subordinate clauses the way I like it, he keeps the interest up by breaking chapters into numbered sections so that the unfolding of his ideas become like scenes in a play.
Unlike most tomes of this nature, the reader is also spoiled with the visual; the photos and occasional diagrams, play a huge part in the tone and mood. The photographer, Richard Baker , a silent but powerful collaborator, achieves his best work a section on transmission engineering, which might have been entitled ‘A Celebration of the Geek; against your better judgement, you find you are wooed by the elegance of electricity pylons juxtaposed against nature; joining the pylon appreciation society is just a Google-click away.
De Botton can’t help himself; he has to think about everything and make connections with other human beings; this is great on paper but when he articulates his thoughts to their faces, he provides some gentle, unexpected comic moments. One time he watches a woman on a computer; he confides to the reader she reminds him of a Vermeer. Unfortunately he finds himself telling her this. It was a thought best kept to himself for she backs away.
Indeed, this weekend, Mr Sangue and I shared a de Botton moment. We walked down Sangue Avenue with Twiggy the school caretaker and his beard strode towards us, he dressed in Hawaiian shirt, large floral calf length shorts, socks and sandals while she wore a dress straight out of the Hamish mail order catalogue. We exchanged the time of day but, once they were safely out of earshot, one of us said,
“All that was missing was a pitchfork!”
We agreed that we should have told them they reminded us of a painting.
“They’d have liked that.” We grinned, imagining how they would recoiled from us.
American Gothic by Grant Wood
De Botton’s awkwardness in social situations underscores his belief that no matter how much jargon has evolved in the world of work such as in engineering and in rocket science - we still don’t have as clear cut, nor specialist vocabulary for feelings; in the workplace communications are rife with subtleties but when it comes to sharing our hopes and fears, we remain disconnected from others.
In an interview he was asked if he’d ever done a proper day’s work, but as he rightly points out, the job of a writer is to help us walk in another’s shoes – this he succeeds in doing.
I nodded and sighed with middle aged angst when he spoke of the middle classes belief that jobs should somehow be fulfilling whereas the working classes feel work is something to be endured. It reminded me of a compelling scene in a recent series where a half dozen privileged teenagers experienced life in the front life of Indian clothes production. One Indian father slept on the floor under his machine at night and the English youth, shook his head,
“How can you be happy?” he demanded of the bewildered sweat shop worker, “How can this make you happy?”
“I am happy because I am providing food for my family.” He explained defensively through a translator.
De Botton outlines how we often hold the best version of ourselves at work, conducting ourselves with a skill and efficiency often missing from our personal relationships.
His loping sentences, filled with charm and a love of humanity, give me as much pleasure as anything I could read. In his section on biscuit manufacture, he writes,
…in the hands of an experienced branding expert, decisions about width, shape, coating, packaging and name can furnish a biscuit with a personality as subtly appropriately nuanced as that of a protagonist in a great novel.
As he guides us through the agony and the ecstasy of the work place and the mysteries of logistics, I savoured each turn of phrase and connection but managed to resist the impulse to share sections of the book with friends and family lest they brand me a poseur.
Thank you for allowing me this indulgence.
