The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [30]
But perhaps this neglect was only an appropriate reflection of how little therapists can in the end make sense of human nature. An understandable hunger for answers from potential clients tempts many of them to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, no less immune to the methods of factory farming than a truffle.
The true range of obstacles in the way of unlocking our potential was more accurately acknowledged by the German sociologist Max Weber when, in his essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), he described Goethe as an example of the sort of creative and healthy personality ‘who appears only once in a thousand years’.
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations. It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood, or a dream entertained as we drive along the motorway and feel our plans hovering above a wide horizon. Extraordinary resilience, intelligence and good fortune are needed to redraw the map of our reality, while on either side of the summits of greatness are arrayed the endless foothills populated by the tortured celibates of achievement.
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
I left Symons’s company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.
7.
In the end, twelve literary agents read Symons’s manuscript. All replied politely and with encouragement. The Real Me: Career as an Act of Selfhood remains without a publisher.
1.
In August 2007, on a humid tropical afternoon, an Air France jet touched down in French Guiana, carrying in its Business-class cabin twelve senior executives from a Japanese television company, who had flown from Tokyo to South America to follow the launch of their satellite.
The executives had bought the machine to help them start a new kind of television station, which they hoped would seize the imagination of the Japanese public and overturn the dominance of the state broadcaster NHK, legendary for its narrow focus on lengthy films about the cherry blossom season and the hunting habits of the Tibetan tiger. They had in mind a station that would show anime films about the exploits of warrior robots and romantic dramas about precociously seductive school-girls. They wanted game-shows that would mete out sadistic punishment to their losers and soap operas that would blow open the lid on the extramarital longings