The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [39]
9.
A post-launch party had been organised in a beachside restaurant in Kourou. The dining room had been decorated with images of Ariane and its satellite, and a buffet laid out that included goat, octopus and a tower of barbecued shrimp sculpted into the shape of a launcher.
On the other side of the earth – where it was tomorrow already, though it had been only twenty-seven minutes since the rocket left our company – the upper-stage engine cut out, and Ariane’s nose cone flipped up to allow the satellite to begin its progress under its own power.
There was high emotion, even euphoria, amongst our group. The Japanese executives pressed themselves one by one against the white shirt of the director of the space agency, the NASA staffers began drinking beer, the propulsion team uncorked some Bordeaux. I shared in their excitement. The planet’s outer atmosphere, which so few objects had ever penetrated in its four-and-a-half-billion-year history (how quiet it must have been in space during the Roman era, how uneventful the Middle Ages from 250 kilometres up), had just let through our elegant white spear. The engineers had learnt how to make a home for one of our machines in the most inhuman of places. There would soon be another eye above us in the firmament. I thought of Walt Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’, from Leaves of Grass, in which the poet had pictured himself surveying the earth and the works of man and nature from on high, an imaginative exercise to which only the modern satellite had been able to lend a concrete dimension:
I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;
I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers;
I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,
I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world;
I cross the Laramie plains – I note the rocks in grotesque shapes–the buttes;
I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions – the barren, colorless, sage-deserts…
Now, in a garishly lit room at the fringes of the South American jungle, a glass of Brazilian rum in hand, I turned against my tendencies to pessimism and suspiciousness. It seemed too easy to claim that there was nothing new under the sun, that any material progress would inevitably be counterbalanced by spiritual regress, that our spear-wielding ancestors had been as wise and good as ourselves and that the onward march of rational thought had brought with it nothing but tragedy. Did any of these arguments take into account Ariane’s profile on her way up? Did they credit the impeccable logic of her hydraulic systems? And most of all, did not such bromides merely betray the resentment of a defeated and unimaginative class? I felt my allegiances shift to the engineers and technicians around me, these new medicine men who often sported baseball caps, and had a tendency towards unsophisticated humour – but who had nonetheless mastered the workings of the universe. What astonishing creatures they were! What extraordinary horizons they had opened up!
The only person who seemed unable to join in the excitement was the Hong Kong television presenter, who sat glumly at a table pushing shrimp around her plate. She had found the launch a disappointment, she said and, smiling weakly, added that she had now started her own countdown: to her return to her apartment overlooking Victoria Harbour. Her bitterness smacked of bruised egocentricity. The only topic she appeared comfortable with was mosquitoes. Though tales of the bites of others are usually no less wearing