The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [27]
Watching these sessions on closed circuit television, I came to feel that what was unfolding in the damp room next door was of historical significance. Symons had devoted his life to paying an exceptional degree of attention to the most minor feelings of another person. After millennia in which action had been privileged over reflection, and intelligence primarily restricted to the discussion of arid abstract ideas, an ordinary human’s everyday confusions had at last found a forum in which they were being accorded the methodical consideration they deserved. Among all the other, better-established businesses catering to elements far down our hierarchy of needs – businesses offering assistance with gardening and cleaning, accountancy and computers – here, finally, was an enterprise devoted to the interpretation of the critical, yet troublingly indistinct, radio-transmissions of the psyche.
Above Symons’s desk was a photograph of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture entitled ‘Atlas’ Slave, from the collection of the Accademia Gallery in Florence. In this block of stone, arrested midway on its journey from raw material to museum piece, an as-yet-headless human figure is seen struggling to emerge from a chunk of marble. The partially completed object appealed to Symons as a metaphor for what he believed that career counselling might do for all of us: in Nietzsche’s words, help us to become who we are.
5.
A month into my time with him, Symons asked if I might like to follow him on a working trip to the north of England. Our first stop would be Newcastle, where he had reserved a space at a university’s careers fair. Two thousand students were expected to wander through a Victorian hall filled with employers from every sector of the economy and Symons would be offering half-hour consultations, with the option of subsequent discussions over the telephone.
The train from London was packed, so the ticket collector – taking pity on us as we stood in the corridor with large bags holding the components of Symons’s booth – let us into the first-class compartment, where we sat in deep velour-covered armchairs and were served a breakfast of sausages and eggs. Far from cheering Symons up, however, the unanticipated luxury seemed to bring out a melancholic side in him which I had not previously seen. As the remains of industrial England passed by outside the window, he brooded over the debased state of modern culture and manners. Then, shifting his focus, he spoke of how few people were willing to invest in his services, and how few of those engaged him for more than a single introductory session or opted for anything other than his test-based methods of counselling, on the basis of their cost and speed. Most Britons were resigned to spending their entire adult lives working at jobs chosen for them by their unthinking sixteen-year-old selves, he concluded, while across the aisle, in apparent confirmation of this analysis, a teenage girl languidly leafed through the celebrity pages of Bella magazine.
We reached the careers fair just as the doors were being opened, and hurried to assemble our stand. Students streamed in, often in high spirits, travelling in gangs and regularly erupting with threatening guffaws. Their obvious good health and, in some cases, beauty served to suggest that knowledge and experience might not, in the end, be very valuable commodities to take refuge in.
A few passers-by picked up leaflets as they brushed past the stand, but most moved on in a hurry, headed for a defence contractor and a supermarket chain across the way. An unprofitable and wearing day seemed to be confirmed when, in the late afternoon, Symons went through a pile of introductory questionnaires that he had handed out only to discover that one of them had been filled in by Søren Kierkegaard. In the box headed ‘What I would like to achieve in my career’, the nascent comic had written, ‘To overturn the hegemony of pseudo-Christian values and the hypocrisy of