The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [46]
Susan enjoys showing the work to friends. This has nothing to do with vaunting wealth or status. In a sense which is not entirely clear to her, she wishes to tell others that she is a bit like the painting. She has seen the tree before. It is the tree from her childhood in Somerset which she passed on her way to school. It is the tree she saw on cycle rides through the Durham countryside at university. It is the tree which stood in a field across from the hospital when she gave birth to her first son.
Like a modern, secular icon, the painting creates a magnetic field around itself, proposing a fitting attitude and code of conduct for its viewers. The ordinary business of the day normally intrudes insistently on the goings-on in the living room. The television is a jealous screen. Noddy rarely misses a chance to make himself heard. Yet occasionally, late at night, when the rest of the household is in bed, Susan will linger a few moments over the painting and feel herself subtly aligning with its personality and recovering thereby an amplified sense of her history and humanity.
9.
The show comes to a close. Backdated across two years, Taylor has earnt the equivalent of the annual salary of an unsuccessful plumber. There is an impractical side of human nature particularly open to making sacrifices for the sake of creating objects that are more graceful and intelligent than we normally manage to be.
Taylor is undaunted by his fortunes. He has recently visited a village north of Colchester to look at a tributary of the River Colne. He wants his next project to be about water. He plans to set up his base on a jetty where he will, over a number of years, paint the river in a range of its moods and lights.
‘Have you ever noticed water?’ he asks. ‘Properly noticed it, I mean – as if you had never seen it before?’
1.
At the wedding reception of my wife’s youngest cousin, I fell into conversation with an affable middle-aged man who worked for a power company in Scotland. While eating chocolate mousse at a table near the dance floor, we talked of our respective professions and Ian told me that it was his job to install electricity pylons in the Scottish countryside, deciding not only on their location but also specifying their height, size and strength.
In his spare time, he was a founding member of the Pylon Appreciation Society, a group which, despite its meagre resources and frequent opprobrium, organised walks along power lines and looked forward to a time when curiosity about electricity transmission would be granted a place in the pantheon of legitimate interests. With three other members of the society, he had recently undertaken a trip to Japan, where he had been amazed by the nimbleness of the lines strung in the higher wooded valleys west of Tokyo. He had visited South Africa the previous year, where, he said, many pylons were of a highly unusual construction, or at least could seem so to European or American eyes. He described one pylon near Johannesburg which, with wide-open arms, no identifiable base and connectors fixed at a diagonal, matched none of my existing notions of how a transmission tower might be shaped.
Ian pointed out that whereas our culture openly invites us to be aware of birds and historic churches, it places no comparable emphasis on pylons, despite the fact that that they often rival, for ingenuity and beauty, many of the more established objects of our curiosity. He cited as an example Loch Awe in Scotland, a famously picturesque and romantic tourist destination dominated by the ruins of the fourteenth-century Kilchurn Castle, whose grounds are nevertheless crossed by a run of 400-kilowatt pylons linking the hydroelectric power station at Ben Cruachan with the Glasgow suburbs. On postcards of the loch and its castle, however, the electricity lines are almost invariably airbrushed out, so that the scenery pretends to a fictitious innocence, the bare hills and unsullied lake being symptomatic of what Ian (having grown increasingly garrulous under the influence