The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [56]
After showering and dressing comes a bowl of Crunchy Nut; then a scramble for a handbag and a raincoat for the walk in the chill air to the train station. Once outside, it seems extraordinary that the natural world should still exist and be so apparently undisturbed and serene, so indifferent to human concerns, with a new sky which has wiped away yesterday’s squalls and holds no grudges, a scene of innocent beauty that bolsters any attempt to search within oneself for reserves of resilience and good humour.
The train will be on time, say the screens at the station, and the accountant walks to the end of the platform under Victorian arches spongy with the paint of decades, past advertisements for West End plays and day excursions to historic castles. A plane crosses high overhead, a veteran of a still earlier departure, perhaps with a child on board at this very moment gazing down and seeing, within the circumference of a window, the full extent of the railway line threading its way from the coast to the city. Back on the ground, from a distance, swaying slightly from side to side, its headlamps on and sparks flashing around its wheels, a green-liveried train comes into view, sounding its toylike horn against a wide horizon.
Entering the carriage feels like interrupting a congregation. The cold air cuts into daydreams which must have begun far up the line and swelled across the wheat fields. The settled passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of taking notice, but they betray their awareness of the new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to allow her to struggle past them to one of the remaining unoccupied seats. The train moves off, resuming its rhythmical clicking along tracks laid down a century and a half ago, when the capital first began plucking workers from their beds in faraway villages whose outlying farms had once marked the boundaries of their inhabitants’ known world.
There is something improbable about the silence in the carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation’s economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper. To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity. Today there is a story about a man who fell asleep at the wheel of his car after staying up late into the night committing adultery on the Internet – and drove off an overpass, killing a family of five in a caravan below. Another item speaks of a university student, beautiful and promising, who went missing after a party and was found in pieces in the back of a minicab five days later. A third rehearses the particulars of an affair between a tennis coach and her thirteen-year-old pupil. These accounts, so obviously demented and catastrophic, are paradoxically consoling, for they help us to feel sane and