The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [3]
The drift toward specialisation exists at the mechanical level too. The port area is filled with machines unavailable to the general public, which have none of the flexibility, but then again none of the dilettantish weaknesses, of generic conveyances like lorries and vans. They resemble peculiar-looking animals whose isolated habitats have rewarded the emergence of strange talents – the ability to suck beetles out of mud through one’s nose, for instance, or to hang upside down above an underground river – while forgiving a lack of more pedestrian skills. The R30XM2 lift-truck built by the Hyster Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio, may have a top speed of just five kilometres an hour, but in the restricted context of a warehouse, it skims gracefully along concrete floors and exhibits a balletic agility in extricating rolls of paper from the top shelves on either side of a tight aisle.
It seems natural to admire the patience and nerves of those who have put up the money to build these limbs of industry, for example, the two hundred and fifty million dollars required merely to dip the keel of a trans-Pacific container ship into the water. The investors know that there is nothing implausible or hubristic in their appropriating the life savings of a nation’s postmen or nurses and then betting those sums on the financing of warehouses in Panama and back offices in Hamburg. They can let their funds disappear out of sight for a decade or more, leave them in the hands of captains and first officers, allow them to cross the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, sail the Long Island Sound and the Ionian Sea, dock in the container ports of Aden and Tangiers, confident that their investment will eventually sluice back to them swollen with the rewards of patience and application. They know that their outlay is in truth a form of prudence and incomparably less dangerous than leaving the money under the bed, to the eventual impoverishment and ruination of all.
4.
Why, then, endowed as they are with both practical importance and emotional resonance, do the cargo ships and port facilities go unnoticed, except by those immediately involved in their operations?
It is not just because they are hard to locate and forbiddingly signposted. Some of Venice’s churches are similarly secreted away but nonetheless prodigally visited. What renders the ships and ports invisible is an unwarranted prejudice which deems it peculiar to express overly powerful feelings of admiration towards a gas tanker or a paper mill – or indeed towards almost any aspect of the labouring world.
Yet not everyone has been dissuaded. At the end of a pier in Gravesend, five men are standing together in the rain. They are dressed in waterproof plastic jackets and heavy-soled boots. They are silent and intent, looking out at the mist-cloaked river. They are tracking a shape, which they know from their timetables to be the Grande Nigeria. They also know that she is bound for Lagos, that her hold is filled with Ford parts for the African market, that she is powered by two Sulzer 900 diesel engines and that she measures 214 metres from stem to stern.
There is no practical reason for their scrutiny. They are not in charge of preparing her berth for its next occupant or, like the staff at the nearby control tower, assigning her a shipping lane for the journey out to the North Sea. They wish only to admire her and note her passage. They bring to the study of harbour life a devotion more often witnessed in relation to art, their behaviour implying a belief that creativity and intelligence can be as present in the transport of axles around the tip of the western Sahara as they are in the use of impasto in a female nude. Yet how fickle museum-goers seem by comparison, with their impatient interest in cafeterias, their susceptibility to gift shops, their