The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

by Alain De Botton

  A screen had been set up to provide us with a live feed from the control room. At their terminals, a group of thirty were monitoring Ariane’s vital functions. Dr Proudhon, back from the turtles, was at his desk, staring impassively at a bank of screens. In a challenge to the team’s sense of their indispensability, a second identical control centre was up and running a few kilometres further away to the east, harbouring another thirty, identically trained people, standing by to pick up operational command were the launcher to get off to a temperamental start and incinerate their colleagues.

  Across the humid night, Ariane stood out on its platform, illuminated by a set of arc lamps around which clouds of tropical insects were dancing frenziedly. Deeper in the jungle, there were peccaries and spider monkeys, giant anteaters and harpy eagles, while in this unlikely outpost of air-conditioned Newtonian civilisation, something was preparing to leave the planet. All shipping and aircraft had been cleared in an arc extending to the West African coast. Ariane’s engines took their last breaths of oxygen through a thick black umbilical cord. Every remaining human had been removed from the area. It was hard not to feel some of the same sadness that might attend the departure of an ocean liner or the lowering of a coffin.

  Thirty seconds before lift-off, Dr Proudhon’s voice came over the loudspeakers. The tapir seemed ready to allow the mission to proceed. The work of years was about to condense itself into an instant. Time, which in so many of our mid-afternoons flows by aimlessly and languidly, felt meaningful at last. With ten seconds left, like a prison warder releasing his charge, Dr Proudhon turned a set of keys and initiated the formal count-down. There would now be no way for matters to end peacefully. Dix, neuf, huit, sept, retrait des ombilicaux … It was peculiar to hear a sequence so indelibly associated, via cinema, with Cape Canaveral being enunciated in another language. At cinq, there was a dull sound as if a shell had gone off, and a first puff of smoke rose from the bottom of the launcher. By trois, white billows had enveloped its base, and on the cue of un, et décollage …, the rocket ripped itself off its pad in immaculate silence.

  When the noise reached us a second later, we recognised it as the loudest any of us had ever heard, louder of course than thunder, jets and the explosive charges set off in quarries, the concentrated energies of tens of millions of years of solar energy being released in an instant. We recognised that we were caught up in an irreproducible and irrepresentable event. Moreover, what lent the scene its particular drama, though it would invariably be omitted from later accounts, was our terror as to what would happen next, for it seemed unlikely that there could ever be a sane, bloodless conclusion to this cataclysm.

  The rocket rose, and there was a collective gasp, a most naive, amazed Ahh, inarticulate and primordial, as all of us for a moment forgot ourselves – our education, manners and sense of irony – to follow the fine white javelin on its ascent through the southern skies.

  There was light, too: the richest orange of the bomb maker’s palette. The rocket became a giant burning bulb in the firmament, letting us see as if by daylight the beach, the town of Kourou, the jungle, the space centre’s buildings and the faces of our stunned fellow spectators.

  The launch seemed capable of upholding any number of symbolic readings. Here was a tube carrying an Asian television satellite into orbit, but it was also, depending on one’s inclinations (and there was little in the scene to prevent such thoughts), a spirit, Yahweh, the Holy Trinity, or a reincarnation of Mawari, the omnipotent creator of the Waiwai universe. The scene brought to mind the moments of smoke and fire which the Old Testament prophets had invoked to make their audiences shudder before the majesty of their lord. And yet this modern impression of divinity was being generated by the most secular and pagan of machines. Science had taught us to upstage the gods.

  The launcher pierced through a layer of clouds and disappeared, leaving only an untraceable roar which reverberated across the heavens, the earth and the jungle. Then, through a gap in the clouds, it promptly reappeared, higher up than any plane could fly and reduced to a smudge of flame. The satellite I had been in a room with just a few days before was already reaching the upper atmosphere. The rocket boosters had been jettisoned somewhere in between and were on their way down, halfway to Africa by now, swaying from parachutes.

  An odd quiet settled over us again. A nature-made wind could be heard through the trees, then the call of a monkey. My mouth was dry. I realised that my left hand was hanging in mid-air, still fixed in the same position it had been in when the commotion began. Nearby, under a tent in which a few rows of chairs had been set up, two people were speaking quietly in French. A young woman with shoulder-length hair and an unaffected sort of beauty was explaining to a friend how the satellite would reach its final orbit. She had on a white cotton skirt adorned with small bluebells, and she was using one of her knees to represent the earth and a long, slender finger to trace the path of the satellite. She was keen to make clear to her companion that the launcher would not, as might have been presumed, deliver the satellite all the way to its destination; instead, its job was to lift it 250 kilometres into the atmosphere, to what was known as the point of injection, from where the satellite would require an additional ten days to travel, by means of its own motors, to its orbiting location, thirty-six thousand kilometres above Japan. It would need to complete a number of lower orbits in a curious elliptical shape (sketched across her skirt) before it achieved sufficient force to describe a perfect circle (around her left knee) – an intricate piece of ballistic science I was unable to follow to its conclusion, for the tensions of the scene grew distracting enough to force me to walk out further into the night.

  Command of the rocket now passed from the engineers in Kourou to a series of ground tracking stations which ringed the earth, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of their host countries. The first of these was located in the middle of the Atlantic, on Ascension Island, where a small building was manned by a solitary technician brought over from France by ship a month earlier, whose one responsibility was to track Ariane’s journey during the four-minute window following the ejection of its boosters. After that, control devolved to another, similarly lonely tracking facility north of Libreville, in Gabon, which in turn ceded it to a station in Malindi, Kenya. The last in the chain was a lighthouse in the western Australian desert, to whose isolation I felt, at that moment, singularly able to relate.

  9.

  A post-launch party had been organised in a beachside restaurant in Kourou. The dining room had been decorated with images of Ariane and its satellite, and a buffet laid out that included goat, octopus and a tower of barbecued shrimp sculpted into the shape of a launcher.

  On the other side of the earth – where it was tomorrow already, though it had been only twenty-seven minutes since the rocket left our company – the upper-stage engine cut out, and Ariane’s nose cone flipped up to allow the satellite to begin its progress under its own power.

  There was high emotion, even euphoria, amongst our group. The Japanese executives pressed themselves one by one against the white shirt of the director of the space agency, the NASA staffers began drinking beer, the propulsion team uncorked some Bordeaux. I shared in their excitement. The planet’s outer atmosphere, which so few objects had ever penetrated in its four-and-a-half-billion-year history (how quiet it must have been in space during the Roman era, how uneventful the Middle Ages from 250 kilometres up), had just let through our elegant white spear. The engineers had learnt how to make a home for one of our machines in the most inhuman of places. There would soon be another eye above us in the firmament. I thought of Walt Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’, from Leaves of Grass, in which the poet had pictured himself surveying the earth and the works of man and nature from on high, an imaginative exercise to which only the modern satellite had been able to lend a concrete dimension:

  I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;

  I see continual trains of cars wi
nding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers;

  I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,

  I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world;

  I cross the Laramie plains – I note the rocks in grotesque shapes–the buttes;

  I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions – the barren, colorless, sage-deserts…

  Now, in a garishly lit room at the fringes of the South American jungle, a glass of Brazilian rum in hand, I turned against my tendencies to pessimism and suspiciousness. It seemed too easy to claim that there was nothing new under the sun, that any material progress would inevitably be counterbalanced by spiritual regress, that our spear-wielding ancestors had been as wise and good as ourselves and that the onward march of rational thought had brought with it nothing but tragedy. Did any of these arguments take into account Ariane’s profile on her way up? Did they credit the impeccable logic of her hydraulic systems? And most of all, did not such bromides merely betray the resentment of a defeated and unimaginative class? I felt my allegiances shift to the engineers and technicians around me, these new medicine men who often sported baseball caps, and had a tendency towards unsophisticated humour – but who had nonetheless mastered the workings of the universe. What astonishing creatures they were! What extraordinary horizons they had opened up!

  The only person who seemed unable to join in the excitement was the Hong Kong television presenter, who sat glumly at a table pushing shrimp around her plate. She had found the launch a disappointment, she said and, smiling weakly, added that she had now started her own countdown: to her return to her apartment overlooking Victoria Harbour. Her bitterness smacked of bruised egocentricity. The only topic she appeared comfortable with was mosquitoes. Though tales of the bites of others are usually no less wearing than those of their dreams, she boasted at length about how she had been devoured during the launch, and proceeded to show off her ankles, hopeful that the interest of so many minute beings might stand as a last, desperate proof of her continued magnetism. I realised then that it might be possible to feel jealous of a rocket.

  10.

  I helped myself to some goat stew and sweet potato and made my way to a table outside. There was an improbable density of stars in the sky, as if glitter had been prodigally scattered across a swathe of black satin. For thousands of years, it had been nature – and its supposed creator – that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.

  But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.

  Nature, meanwhile, had become an object of concern and pity, like a former foe arrived at one’s gates, bleeding to death. No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpassed us, the natural landscape instead everywhere bore the scars of our quixotic powers. We could look up at the diminishing snows of Kilimanjaro and reflect on the ill effects of our turbines. We could fly over denuded stretches of the Amazon and perceive the rain forest to be no more robust than a single flower in our hands. We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

  11.

  I had planned to get a lift back to the Atlantis Hotel from one of the engineers who lived nearby, but at one in the morning, he put on a paper hat and started dancing with a Brazilian waitress, so I headed out alone.

  The streets of Kourou, never an inviting milieu, looked especially drab and sinister this late at night. The shops were shuttered and largely unlit. The Waiwai restaurant, having been robbed the day before by a gang from across the border in Surinam, was cordoned off with police tape.

  I fell into an unexpectedly melancholic mood, perhaps inspired by the realisation of how few of the accomplishments that lay behind Ariane’s launch would in fact be able to filter down reliably to everyday experience and hence how much of life was set to continue as it had always done, prey to the same inner inclemencies, gravitational pulls and depressions as those our cave-dwelling ancestors had known. Our bodies would disintegrate, our plans would be blown off course, we would be visited by cruelty, lust and silliness – and only occasionally would we be in a position to recover contact with the speed, elegance, dignity and intelligence evidenced by the great machines.

  I felt keenly the painful psychological adjustments required by life in modernity: the need to juggle a respect for the potential offered by science with an awareness of how perplexingly limited and narrowly framed might be its benefits. I felt the temptation of hoping that all activities would acquire the excitement and rigours of engineering while recognising the absurdity of those who, overly impressed by technological achievement, lose sight of how doggedly we will always be pursued by baser forms of error and absurdity.

  12.

  The next day was my last in French Guiana. To kill time before my evening flight, I toured the capital, Cayenne, ending up in the nation’s main museum, a traditional tin-roofed Creole house in a poor state of repair, filled with spears, colonial portraits and pickled snakes.

  In a back room hung depictions of the country’s inhabitants at work, across different periods of history. The first frame was of a family in animal skins peeling fruit; the second of some fishermen staring limply from the side of a canoe; the third of a horde of slaves setting fire to a plantation building. Finally, twice the size of the other images, in attractive Technicolor, came a picture of five white-coated engineers attending to a satellite’s cabling in a hangar in the space centre. The moral was clear: French Guiana had overcome the degrading labour of its past and was headed towards a future consecrated by the hand of science.

  Yet 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.

  13.

  A little more than a week after my return home, the Lockheed Martin satellite successfully entered its orbit, joining the hundreds of others which necklace the earth. It now beams down images of WOWOW TV’s programmes across Japan, from where it can sometimes be seen on a clear night, impersonating one of nature’s stars.

  1.

  Stephen Taylor has spent much of the last two years in a wheat field in East Anglia repeatedly painting the same oak tree under a range of different of lights and weathers. He was out in two feet of snow last winter and this summer, at three in the morning, he lay on his back tracing the upper branches of the tree by the light of a solstice moon.

  On a typical summer’s day, this unknown middle-aged artist is loading his car, ready for work, by seven in the morning. He lives in a dilapidated terraced house in the centre of Colchester, a town of one hundred thousand inhabitants, ninety kilometres north-east of London. His sagging, dented Citroën has reached a stage of decrepitude so advanced that it seems set for immortality. Across the back seats, strewn as if the vehicle had just been involved in a head-on colli
sion, are canvases, easels, insect repellant, old sandwiches, a bag of brushes and a box of paints. There is also a suitcase jammed with scarves and jumpers, for outdoor painters tend to know the story of how Cézanne caught a chill one morning while painting a sparrow in a field in Aix-en-Provence – and was dead by sunset.

  The road out of Colchester leads Taylor past a fractured landscape of warehouses and building sites. The commuter traffic is impatient and quick to anger. Near the train station, an old crab-apple tree stands in the middle of a roundabout, an unlikely survivor of the roadworks which made off with its fellows. Eight miles west of town, Taylor turns off the main road and starts down a little-used farm track. Waist-high stalks bow and disappear beneath the front bumper, like hair through a comb. Taylor finds his usual parking place and, fifteen metres from the tree, arranges his base camp in a clearing in the wheat.

  The oak is estimated to be 250 years old. It was therefore already home to skylarks and starlings when Jane Austen was a baby and George III the ruler of the American colonies.