The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [4]
Admittedly, the ship spotters do not respond to the objects of their enthusiasm with particular imagination. They traffic in statistics. Their energies are focused on logging dates and shipping speeds, recording turbine numbers and shaft lengths. They behave like a man who has fallen deeply in love and asks his companion if he might act on his emotions by measuring the distance between her elbow and her shoulder blade. But in converting a passion into a set of facts, the spotters are at least following a pattern with an established pedigree, most noticeable in academia, where an art historian, on being stirred to tears by the tenderness and serenity he detects in a work by a fourteenth-century Florentine painter, may end up writing a monograph, as irreproachable as it is bloodless, on the history of paint manufacture in the age of Giotto. It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.
But whatever their inarticulacies, the ship-spotters are at least appropriately alive to some of the most astonishing aspects of our time. They know what it is about our world that would detain a Martian or a child. They take pleasure in sensing their smallness and ignorance next to the expansive intelligence of the modern collective mind. Standing beside a docked ship, their heads thrown back to gaze at its steel turrets disappearing into the sky, they enter into a state of silent, satisfied wonder, like pilgrims before the buttresses of Chartres.
Nor are they ashamed to seem eccentric when their curiosity demands it. They crouch low to catch sight of ships’ propellers. They fall asleep thinking of where in the ocean a particular tanker might be. Their concentration recalls that of a small child who comes to a halt in the centre of a crowded shopping street and, while passers-by swerve to avoid her, bends down to examine, with the care of a biblical scholar poring over the pages of a vellum-bound book, a piece of chewing gum impressed on the pavement, or the closing mechanism of her coat pocket. They are like children, too, in their upending of conventional ideas of what might constitute a good job, always valuing a profession’s intrinsic interest over its relative material benefit, judging with particular favour the post of crane operator at a container terminal because of the vantage point it offers over ships and quaysides, just as a child might aspire to drive a train because of the seductive hiss of the carriage’s hydraulic doors, or to run a post office based on the satisfaction of adhering airmail labels onto puffy envelopes.
The ship-spotters’ pastime harks back to the habits of premodern travellers, who, upon arriving in a new country, were apt to express particular curiosity about its granaries, aqueducts, harbours and workshops, feeling that the observation of work could be as stimulating as anything on a stage or chapel wall – a relief from a contemporary view which tightly associates tourism with play and therefore steers us away from an interest in aluminium foundries and sewage treatment plants in favour of the trumpeted pleasures of musicals and waxwork museums.
The men down by the river have broken free of such expectations, they freely express their concern for the movement of freight and the thunder of conveyor belts. Whereas an ordinary onlooker might, from their pier, see nothing more than three lorries pulling out of a factory yard, they have learnt to recognise the continuing odyssey of a shipment of Brazilian cane, brought over on the freighter Valeria and now turned into sugar, leaving the Tate and Lyle refinery at Silvertown bound for a Derby establishment involved in raisin cakes. Their satisfactions are akin to those of an ornithologist who, on glimpsing through a pair of binoculars a creature which most people would dismiss as just another