The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [17]
Accordingly, even the head of the Blackstone private equity group (a man whose personal fortune outstripped the wealth of all the kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa since the discovery of fire), had on occasion left behind his penthouse in order to genuflect before pastry. The company headquarters might have borrowed its aesthetic from a roadside motel, but only because, unlike the inhabitants of Versailles and the Escorial palace (distracted as they had been by thoughts of God, power and beauty), the leaders of the biscuit company harboured no doubt as to which divinity they were worshipping.
Perhaps for this reason, I was to encounter no jokes at any biscuit’s expense. The minders of the Ginger Nut and the Rich Tea, of the Jaffa Cake and the Moment, resembled a flock of patient, grave-faced courtiers ministering to the needs of a nursery of wilful infant emperors.
7.
Late one afternoon, after darkness had fallen across the business park in Hayes, rendering particularly visible the lights of aircraft (many of them wide-bodied jets coming in from Asia) as they descended towards Heathrow, I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to the brand performance of the Moments range. It had been almost a year since the biscuit’s launch. Renae’s expression was thoughtful and absorbed, and though I could not immediately have said why, something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting than the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.
A comparable dynamic seemed in play in the head office at Hayes, where there was a marked imbalance between the importance accorded to the supposed centres of interest – the biscuits – and the neglected value of humans like Renae who laboured to meet their demands. I wondered whether the biscuits might not be part of the very problem that they had been designed to address, whether their production and marketing was not indeed contributing to precisely the feelings of emptiness and nervous tension which they claimed to alleviate.
I wondered out loud to Renae why in our society the greatest sums of money so often tended to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things,