The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [44]
Slowly, Taylor’s eyes adjust to the gloom. The preponderance of green in the night sky makes him feel as if he were inside an aquarium. A lamp switches on in a house a few miles away. A star, orange-fuchsia in colour, appears on the horizon as the trees below sway in the breeze, like clusters of coral in an underwater current. Taylor turns on a pocket-sized torch which he has hung around his neck, throwing light onto his box of paints and his easel.
As the night wears on, the human world gradually recedes, leaving Taylor alone with insects and the play of moonlight on wheat. He sees his art as born out of, and hoping to inspire, reverence for all that is unlike us and exceeds us. He never wanted to paint the work of people, their factories, streets, or electricity circuit boards. His attention was drawn to that which, because we did not build it, we must make a particular effort of empathy and imagination to understand, to a natural environment that is uniquely unpredictable, for it is literally unforeseen. His devoted look at a tree is an attempt to push the self aside and recognise all that is other and beyond us – starting with this ancient-looking hulk in the gloom, with its erratic branches, thousands of stiff little leaves and remarkable lack of any direct connection to the human drama.
6.
Studio may be too grand a word to describe a small annex to the bedroom on the first floor of Taylor’s house covered with studies of the oak tree at various times of day and year.
Despite its diminutive size, it is a particularly pleasant room. There are few jobs in which years’ worth of labour can be viewed in a quick scan of four walls and even fewer opportunities granted to us to gather all our intelligence and sensitivity in a single place. Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.
How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object – whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug – and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.
Taylor knows that he is creating things which exceed him. He has a chance to get himself right on the canvas in a way that he cannot in the run of his ordinary life. He is not always the perceptive, patient observer. His social self is beset by frailties. He is nervous around others and apt to mask his anxieties behind an exaggerated laugh. Nor is he conventionally powerful. His journey has been dogged by peculiarly English discomforts. Achievements which might in other countries have come more easily – leaving behind a provincial, working-class background and asserting his artistic identity in cultural and intellectual circles – have been hard won and remain fragile.
Yet when he is at his easel, he can, without arousing any impression of arrogance, say that he knows how to paint. At such moments, his peers are no longer just his drinking companions from the local pubs, and