The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [49]
In a swathe of dense forest known as Stockshill Wood, we came across a red estate car rocking forcefully of its own accord by a narrow path, and Ian remarked that the close observer of power lines must of necessity become a frequent witness to sides of human sexuality which find no easy expression within the parameters of our supposedly liberated society.
Sometimes we thought of death, for there were constant admonishments not to climb the pylons, though starker object lessons were provided by the many animals that lay electrocuted near the base of towers. Swans were empirically in the greatest danger, for an inattentive deity had located their eyes on the sides of their head, with the result that in the dark and in heavy fog they frequently crashed into the lines at full speed. It was normally only the leader of a flock who succumbed, the rest being warned off by the sound of a twelve-kilogram body hitting a cable at fifty kilometres per hour. Local dogs and foxes knew enough about the grid to keep a close eye out, sometimes lying in wait on moonless nights at the bases of pylons, where encounters would ensue between dazed swans, their heads severely distended, and frantic dogs who, fed up with the monotony of their tinned diets, rediscovered the ancestral pleasures of masticating on blood and feather.
I noticed that Ian often measured the distance between spans using an unfamiliar instrument equipped with a tracking wheel on its side, and that he afterwards jotted down notations in a leather-bound notebook. I spotted cream-coloured pages covered with a latticework of algebraic equations whose incomprehensibility had the incidental benefit of freeing me to admire them from a purely aesthetic point of view, as the uninstructed might appreciate a musical score or a piece of classical Arabic.
Noting my puzzlement, Ian told me that he was calculating the force of gravity at work on the cable, and that in his equation l stood for the length of the span, w for the effective weight per unit of length, and TH for the constant along the line. He explained that transmission engineers were unusually blessed in having at their fingertips a highly precise, efficient and universal vocabulary with which to convey even the most labyrinthine electrical scenarios, so that from Iran to Chile, Ψ referred to electric flux, µ to permeability, to permeance, and ά to the temperature coefficient of resistance.
I was struck by how impoverished ordinary language can be by contrast, requiring its user to arrange inordinate numbers of words in tottering and unstable piles in order to communicate meanings infinitely more basic than anything related to an electrical network. I found myself wishing that the rest of mankind would follow the engineers’ example and agree on a series of symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and often painful psychological states- a code which might help us to feel less tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and silent exchanges of equations.
There seemed to be no shortage of feelings to which the engineers’ brevity might be profitably applied. If only a letter could have been identified, for example, with which elegantly to allude to the strange desire one occasionally has to elicit love from people one does not even particularly like (β, say); or the irritation evoked when acquaintances seem to be more worried about one’s illnesses than one is oneself (?); or the still vaguer sense one can sometimes have that