The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [40]
10.
I helped myself to some goat stew and sweet potato and made my way to a table outside. There was an improbable density of stars in the sky, as if glitter had been prodigally scattered across a swathe of black satin. For thousands of years, it had been nature – and its supposed creator – that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.
Nature, meanwhile, had become an object of concern and pity, like a former foe arrived at one’s gates, bleeding to death. No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpassed us, the natural landscape instead everywhere bore the scars of our quixotic powers. We could look up at the diminishing snows of Kilimanjaro and reflect on the ill effects of our turbines. We could fly over denuded stretches of the Amazon and perceive the rain forest to be no more robust than a single flower in our hands. We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.
11.
I had planned to get a lift back to the Atlantis Hotel from one of the engineers who lived nearby, but at one in the morning, he put on a paper hat and started dancing with a Brazilian waitress, so I headed out alone.
The streets of Kourou, never an inviting milieu, looked especially drab and sinister this late at night. The shops were shuttered and largely unlit. The Waiwai restaurant, having been robbed the day before by a gang from across the border in Surinam, was cordoned off with police tape.
I fell into an unexpectedly melancholic mood, perhaps inspired by the realisation of how few of the accomplishments that lay behind Ariane’s launch would in fact be able to filter down reliably to everyday experience and hence how much of life was set to continue as it had always done, prey to the same inner inclemencies, gravitational pulls and depressions as those our cave-dwelling ancestors had known. Our bodies would disintegrate, our plans would be blown off course, we would be visited by cruelty, lust and silliness – and only occasionally would we be in a position to recover contact with the speed, elegance, dignity and intelligence evidenced by the great machines.
I felt keenly the painful psychological adjustments required by life in modernity: the need to juggle a respect for the potential offered by science with an awareness of how perplexingly limited and narrowly framed might be its benefits. I felt the temptation of hoping that all activities would acquire the excitement and rigours of engineering while recognising the absurdity of those who, overly impressed by technological achievement, lose sight of how doggedly we will always be pursued by baser forms of error and absurdity.
12.
The next day was my last in French Guiana. To kill time before my evening flight, I toured the capital, Cayenne, ending up in the nation’s main museum, a traditional tin-roofed Creole house in a poor state of repair, filled with spears, colonial portraits and pickled snakes.
In a back room hung depictions of the country’s inhabitants