One Somali Airlines 707 was lying on its side, with only one wing still attached. Qantas had bought the machine in 1966 and flown it between London and Sydney for eight years before selling it to Malaysian Airlines. In Kuala Lumpur, the new owners had exchanged the kangaroo painted on its tail for a stylised bird and removed the first-class compartment. After completing a decade’s worth of trips to Hong Kong, the plane – by now badly stained around the rear of its fuselage – had been passed on to the Somalis. Limping aloft with the help of unauthorised spare parts, the Boeing had ferried soldiers, smugglers, aid workers and tourists between Mogadishu, Johannesburg and Frankfurt. Then had come an accident with a van at Mogadishu airport, a bullet wound in the tail during a battle with insurgents and an emergency landing in Nairobi with one of the engines on fire. After the airline went broke and its CEO was shot dead in a bungled robbery, an agreement was reached to ship the frail machine to its last resting place.
It was striking to see how quickly the planes had aged: though the oldest of these examples had not yet been off the production line for half a century, they seemed more antique than a Greek temple. Inside the cabins were remnants of now-obsolete technologies: outsize Bakelite phones, coils of fat electric cables, bulky boxes on the ceilings where film projectors had once been slotted. The cockpits had seats for flight engineers, whose jobs were presently being done by computers the size of hardcover books. Some aircraft still sported their Pratt & Whitney JT3D engines, the proud workhorses of the 1970s, which had generated a then-remarkable 17,500 pounds of thrust, little guessing that a few decades later their successors would, with a fraction of the fuel or noise output, be capable of producing five times that.
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick’s skull.
Identifying a TWA plane which had lost both its cockpit and its wheels, I climbed up into the fuselage and arranged myself in seat 1C, a royal-blue executive chair with a large stain in the middle of its lower cushion. It was seven in the evening but still bright and agreeably warm. I wanted to press the call button and order a Coke from the stewardess, who was perhaps now dead. I noticed that a few rows behind me, the emergency oxygen masks had dropped down from the overhead compartment. They had done so not in the gruesome accident one associates them with, when the engines are on fire and the emergency slide lies tumescent around the main door, the ladies having grown too troubled to remember to remove their high-heeled shoes, but simply through the slow erosion of their spring catches. Perhaps we are always more likely to die like this, without particular drama, without firemen in smoke hoods and foam on the runway, without the comfort of a collective accident and the sympathy of newscasters, but through an insipidly slow process of disintegration, the masks only gradually wearing loose and swinging idly in the desert wind, witnessed by rattlesnakes and shy and incontinent desert tortoises.
My thoughts turned to the people who had built and animated these machines, the employees who had exchanged business cards at Le Bourget at the Paris air show of 1968, who had made the Bakelite intercom phones in Trenton, New Jersey, followed the expansion of Eastern Airlines and, in a factory near Calgary, fashioned the blankets which were now disappearing into the Mojave dust. I thought, too, of the captain, and of the flirtatious remarks he might have exchanged with the stewardess who brought his dinner in to him on a tin-foil-covered tray during a trip down to the Caribbean in 1971, the same year Idi Amin came to power and John Newcombe won his third Wimbledon. I imagined his gold braided cap and his aviator glasses, his tanned, bristly arms, his descent towards the tarmac at Kingston and his purple and magenta room overlooking the pool of the newly opened Sunseeker Club near the airport.
How improbable the thought of his own death would have seemed to him, how contrary to his aerobic body and acute mind. There would have been few reminders or signs that there were a finite number of times that his knees would comfortably bend to pick up a suitcase, that eventually even his most basic thoughts would become too arduous for him to connect, that he was working his way through the ten thousand days still allocated to him and that the small daily jolts of anxiety he experienced when dealing with congestion at O’Hare or bad weather over the Gulf of Mexico would one morning reach critical mass in the form of a sudden and definitive tightening in the chest in a driveway in a Phoenix suburb.
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. We function on the basis of a necessary myopia. Therein is the sheer energy of existence, a blind will no less impressive than that which we find in a moth arduously crossing a window ledge, stepping around a dollop of paint left by a too-hasty brush, refusing to contemplate the broader scheme in which he will be dead by nightfall.
The arguments for our triviality and vulnerability are too obvious, too well known and too tedious to rehearse. What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity even when their wider non-sense is clear. The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us. Good health encourages us to identify with all human experiences in all lands, to sigh at a murder in a faraway country, to hope for economic growth and technological progress far beyond the limits of our own lifespan, forgetting that we are never more than a few rogue cells away from the end.
To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked ‘11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break’, to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. Let it surprise us while we are shipping wood pulp across the Baltic Sea, removing the heads of tuna, developing a nauseating variety of biscuit, advising a client on a change of career, firing a satellite with which to beguile a generation of Japanese schoolgirls, painting an oak tree in a field, laying an electricity line, doing the accounts, inventing a deodorant dispenser or making an extended-strength coiled tube for an airliner. Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis. Would anyone who watched the departure of Xerxes’ army on its way to conquer the Greeks, or Taj Chan Ahk giving orders for the construction of the golden temples of Cancuén, or the British colonial administrators inaugurating the Indian postal system, have had it in their hearts to fill their passionate actors in on the eventual fate of their efforts?
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 tabl
e. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.
Picture Acknowledgements
This project was designed as much as a photo reportage as an essay. I had the privilege of working from the outset with the photographer Richard Baker (www.bakerpictures.com), to whom I owe a great debt, both for his eye and for his unflagging good humour in moments of crisis. A fuller selection of images can be seen at: www.alaindebotton.com/work
Additional picture credits: Chapter Three: Edward Hopper, New York Movie, © Museum of Modern Art, New York. Chapter Six: Images of Stephen Taylor © Ken Adlard, New Moon Photography, Norfolk; aerial photograph of the tree, Stephen Taylor (www.stephentaylorpaintings.com), courtesy Essex and Suffolk Gliding Club; photograph of gallery interior, Vertigo, 62 Great Eastern Street, London, courtesy of the artist.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the many institutions and individuals who allowed me access to their places of work and spent many hours discussing their occupations with me. Particular thanks are due to Martin Garside, Glenys Dawson, Fred Stroyan, Lucy Pelham Burn, Mariyam Seena, Sarah Mahir, Yasir Waheed, Mamduh W., Naleem Mohamed, Salma Ahmed, Ibrahim Rayan, Franco Bonacina, Jose Rossi, Brigitte Kolmsee, Jason Orton, Iain McAulay. Some names have been altered in the text to protect identities. I would also like to thank Tom Weldon, Helen Fraser, John Makinson, Dorothy Straight, Joana Niemeyer, Dan Frank, Nicole Aragi, Simon Prosser, Caroline Dawnay and Charlotte de Botton.
About the Author
Alain de Botton is the author of three books of fiction and five previous books of nonfiction, including How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, and The Art of Travel. He was born in Switzerland and now lives in England.
Copyright © 2009 by Alain de Botton
Photographs (excepting those otherwise attributed on page 328) copyright ©
2009 by Richard Baker
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, published by the Penguin Group, Penguin Books, Ltd., London.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Botton, Alain
The pleasures and sorrows of work / Alain de Botton.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37830-9
1. Work—Miscellanea. I. Title.
HD4901.D35 2008 306.3′6—dc22 2008046060
www.pantheonbooks.com
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