The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [36]
Four hundred kilometres from where the rocket was being readied, in the rain forest on the border with Brazil, lived the last of the Waiwai Indians. The majority of the tribe had long ago left the jungle and moved into towns or government-sponsored camps (one group lived in Kourou, where they ran the popular Waiwai takeaway restaurant in the Place de l’Europe). But those left in the wild preserved the rudiments of a cosmology comparable in structure to that of the inhabitants of the prescientific West.
For the Waiwai, the movements of the planets, the cycles of the weather, the behaviour of animals and the properties of plants, were all apprehended mythologically, without any attempt at precise observation or detached understanding. There was no room for developments in knowledge. Time stood still. Traditions could not be altered or probed, being the preserve of sacred elders and medicine men. The Waiwai projected themselves into all they saw. Why might the moon be a particularly deep shade of red in the evening? Because someone in the tribe had developed violent thoughts, likely to break into bloodshed the next day. Why had it not rained? Because the network of anacondas who lived in the clouds and spat down droplets of water had been angered during a hunt. What was the sky? A clay pan resting on three upright rocks.
In the Waiwai schema, man could not directly affect the world. He would have to ask, or more accurately implore, the spirits responsible for its functioning. On a breathless day, he would have to take care not to injure any tapirs, for the wind was controlled by a giant example of one hidden in the sky, responsible for wafting a large palm leaf to create a breeze. If he wanted the sun to come out, he would have to put on a diadem of toucan feathers and blow down a long pipe carved with anaconda patterns, so as to flatter the sacred orb into rising into the sky.
The scientists now occupied by fuelling and loading in their hangars at the edge of the jungle had moved unrecognisably far from such thinking. They had completed PhDs on the numerical analysis of stirred-tank hydronynamics and the drag reduction effects of polymer additives on turbulent pipe flow. They read the universe as an orderly and logical machine, which worked independently of their sins and virtues, a mere impassive clock, which could be taken apart by reason and rendered theoretically predictable without requiring recourse to incantation.
And yet, as a non-scientist examining the rocket-assembly building, gazing at a needle of solid propellant nine storeys tall, one felt that a most unmagical of approaches had nevertheless succeeded in producing a device which was not entirely free of supernatural associations. Living with science without understanding it forced one to consider machines in the same quasi-mystical way in which a sparsely clothed Waiwai might have contemplated the phenomena of the heavens. What talent and insolence it was on the part of the white-coated fraternity to have succeeded in generating an impression of mystical awe with the help only of an ammonium perchlorate composite.
8.
Nevertheless, as the appointed launch time approached, a feeling of tension and of foreboding became palpable. The sky turned a purply-grey, and the air was oddly still. In Kourou, a France Telecom van collided with a car at the corner of the Avenue Nobel and the rue Mère Theresa. The lizards were out in force at the Atlantis Hotel.
The weather, always complex and histrionic in the region, was of particular concern to the scientists. Almost every afternoon brought a violent thunderstorm, with clouds up to eighteen kilometres thick, eight kilometres being the usual maximum over northern Europe. In tearing through such a lofty mass at great velocity, the rocket ran a risk of driving a lightning bolt into its own flight path. Furthermore, the area was known for its high atmospheric winds, which