The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [64]
There is nothing surprising about the corporation’s jealousy. Every society historically has had to regulate the sexual impulse in order to get anything done. It is only our naive belief in our own open-mindedness which prevents us from recognising the extent to which an old-fashioned sexual repression has to be buried in our codes of professional conduct.
Yet equally, and paradoxically, such repression has disproportionately sexual consequences, for it is an essential feature of the erotic that it thrives most fully precisely where it is most forbidden. There were few places in the fourteenth century as sexually charged as the convents of the Mother of God, just as there are few settings today as libidinous as the laminated open-plan spaces of our corporations. The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled capacity to excite desire.
If these two institutions have imposed harsh penalties on those who display signs of transgressive behaviour, it is because each is, or was, the locus of its society’s most cherished values: the teachings of Christ on the one hand, and money on the other. Money is to the office as God was to the nunnery – and whether physical desire is condemned in the language of a sexual-harassment policy or in terms of sin and Satan, it stands as a comparable heresy, for it has dared to deny canonical goals, impudently implying that there may be elements more valuable in the world, and more consuming, than the stock price or the Redeemer.
The repression has paid dividends in one area, at least: logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.
9.
The office starts to empty out at six, and an hour later, only those working on urgent presentations and reports are left, some of them facing a long night at their desks, punctuated by the arrival of Cokes and pizzas at around one in the morning.
The sun is nearing the horizon, throwing an orange light across the tower’s glazing. What has been accomplished today? One employee advised a client on the tax implications of importing apples from Slovenia. Another wrote a paper comparing sales taxes in five West African countries. A third handed out name badges and logged in three hundred incoming calls. These achievements will no doubt lose some of their significance with the perspective of time. Three years from now, the diary of the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of July will have become almost unintelligible, when it had once been sharply divided into pressing hour-long increments, devoted to appointments with colleagues whose very names and faces will have grown indistinct.
An employee from Advisory Services heads for London Bridge station and his commute back to Kent, stopping off on the way at a supermarket for a bottle of wine and a chicken breast in cheese sauce. He did not leave the building all day, for he was busy drawing up a spreadsheet analysis of an investment made by an American medical diagnostic firm and responding to emails from colleagues at work on a project in Denver. He is surprised, on stepping out of the air-conditioned atrium, to find how warm it is outside, how immemorial the river looks, how many people there are alive, what varied sizes they are and demeanours they wear.
Exceptionally, the train tonight allows him half a carriage to himself. He has been making this same journey for the past twelve years. In the slanting summer light, when the smell of cut grass enters the windows from across the open countryside, he falls prey to feelings of nostalgia. He puts his