The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [2]
Nevertheless, no quayside can ever appear entirely banal, because people will always be minuscule compared to the great oceans and the mention of faraway ports will hence always bear a confused promise of lives unfolding there which may be more vivid than the ones we know here, a romantic charge clinging to names like Yokohama, Alexandria and Tunis – places which in reality cannot be exempt from tedium and compromise, but which are distant enough to support for a time certain confused daydreams of happiness.
3.
In truth, the ships’ destination is not a single, cohesive port but rather a loose conjunction of terminals and factories untidily lining a stretch of the Thames between Gravesend and the Woolwich ferry. It is here that vessels slip in continuously, during humid summers and fog-bound winters, night and day, to deliver the bulk of London’s gravel and its reinforced steel, its soya beans and coal, its milk and its paper pulp, the sugar cane for its biscuits and the hydrocarbons for its generators – an area as noteworthy as any of the museums of the city, but about which the guidebooks are always silent.
Numerous factories are situated on the very bank of the river, close enough to scoop or suck raw materials directly from the holds of ships, and are at work producing some of the less celebrated ingredients behind the smooth functioning of our utilitarian civilisation: the polyols added to toothpaste to help it retain its moisture, the citric acid used to stabilise laundry detergent, the isoglucose to sweeten cereal, the glyceryl tristearate to make soap and the xanthan gum to ensure the viscosity of gravy.
In charge of these processes are engineers who have successfully stamped out their natural laziness to master the austere dilemmas of chemistry and physics, people who may have spent twenty years specialising in the storage of flammable solvents or the reaction of wood pulp to water vapour – and in their leisure time, leaf through the Hazardous Cargo Bulletin, the world’s only monthly magazine dedicated to the safe handling and transport of oils and chemicals.
However inhuman the facilities of the port might seem in scale, it is in the end only our own personal and prosaic appetites that have created them. A river-side factory, with tubes like a hydra’s tentacles snaking around its midriff and crowned by a chimney wheezing orange smoke, is responsible for nothing more sinister or esoteric than the manufacture of cheddar biscuits. A tanker has crossed the muddy-brown North Sea from Rotterdam carrying carbon dioxide with which to make bubbles for children’s lemonade. The steely grey box of the Kimberly-Clark factory at Northfleet, eight storeys high and large enough to shelter an aircraft carrier, is turning out cartons of two-ply toilet roll. It is our collective tastes for sweets and nuts, drinks and tissues which has summoned ships from distant continents and thrown up industrial towers vying with the dome of St Paul’s.
So arcane are the operations around the port that no single person could ever hope to grasp more than a fragment of their totality. A ship’s captain may enjoy superlative command over the contours of the lower Thames, but no sooner has his vessel docked than he will be relegated to the status of an apprentice observer of the business of jetty engineering and the long-term refrigeration of citrus fruit – his jurisdiction ending as abruptly as the authority of his nautical chart.
However, any sadness we might feel about the demise of the generalist can be offset by the recognition that our age offers us access to unimpeachable masters of specific trades, for example, the storage of bitumen or the construction of ship-loading conveyors – in itself as comforting as the thought that there exist professors of medicine concentrated solely on the workings of human liver enzymes, or that at any time, several hundred scholars across the world are investigating