The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [53]
In an essay entitled ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty. He contrasted the nostalgic devotees of old-fashioned poetry with those whom he judged to be true contemporary poetic spirits, deserving of the title less by virtue of anything they had actually written than for their willingness to approach the world without prejudice or partiality. The former camp, he averred, ‘see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own’.
7.
Our line was running into problems. Whereas in the countryside it had often enjoyed straight runs of a dozen or more pylons, the increasing density of the city placed constant obstacles in its path. In setting down its feet, it had to bring to bear all the tact of a bulky man negotiating an object-strewn carpet. It tiptoed around gas storage tanks and railway lines, paused to make way for sewage works and crouched to avoid the wings of Embraers at City Airport. A few miles from central London, in an industrial estate which was home to a Jacuzzi importer and a cake manufacturer, the line prepared to disappear underground for good.
There was, unsurprisingly, no fanfare to mark the moment, no acknowledgement of the chalk downs and the grazing meadows, the backyards of Canterbury and the geese of the Kent marshes. Before the power could enter London’s circuits, it first had to be tamed by a series of porcelain insulators, whose convex, columnar forms recalled the ritual objects of the celestial liturgy of a primitive tribe. At the end of one particularly tall example, a single thick black rubber tube, containing the steadied force of the entire line, slipped unceremoniously into a small hole in the ground, unknown to almost all of its five million end-users.
Ian had a train to catch. We confided to each other that we were unexpectedly sorry to say good-bye, feeling that we had experienced things together which would be hard to share with others.
In its new, modest incarnation, the line was now bound for a substation concealed on Shaftesbury Avenue at the rear of a Chinese restaurant specialising in Schezuan peppered duck. From there, its electricity would be distributed to the cosmetics counter at Boots on Oxford Street, to the cash machines of Tottenham Court Road, to the headquarters of British Petroleum in St James’s Square and to a sign outside a club on Brewer Street advertising the services of a group of Estonians pole-dancing in the basement.
Along its subterranean course, the line would dissolve into ever smaller forces, from a prodigious 400 kilovolts to a more moderate 275 and thence, in the residential streets, to a placid 132, until it emerged from sockets, shorn of all impetuousness, at a mere 240 volts. As it passed, the current would perform the ultimate act of generosity: it would absolve its consumers from having to give it any thought, it would ensure that none of them would ever need to dwell on the idea of a run of steel-grey pylons tracing their origins back across the landscape to the southern coast, to a monolithic power station on the edge of a shingle beach, enduring the mutinous Channel waves and a corrosive wind while emitting a