The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [76]
A disco ball started spinning, and along with it ABBA. Because it had been a long day and it was unlikely that any of us would ever meet again, it did not seem inappropriate to dance, especially when the speakers began throbbing to ‘Super Trouper’, a song whose obscure lyrics hinted at an international liaison facilitated by the very planes that had inspired our gathering.
The delegates danced to forget the anxieties of salesmanship and to shake off the nervous anticipation generated by industry gossip. They danced to stop thinking about the dynamic future of aviation, with its next generation of afterburners and electromechanical flight decks, its promises of low-fuel-burning engines and nanotechnological wings. With the help of the disco ball, we managed to restore ourselves to the imperfect present, as constituted by a dimly lit bar next to a motorway somewhere in the midst of an industrial cityscape of factories and convention centres. We held one another’s moist palms and swayed across the tiled floor, gaining relief through our shared humanity – our stomachs bloated from too many nuts, our waistlines expanding, our digestions unhealthy, our sleep interrupted, our expenses fiddled – creatures who occasionally looked up at the stars but remained essentially and defiantly earthbound.
2.
The experience of the air show stayed with me. I began to think differently about planes. When airborne, I assessed the seat upholstery, the ailerons and the light fittings and dwelt on what their inclusion on board presupposed: exchanges of business cards, grey warehouses, salesmen’s suitcases and cubes of cheese arranged on plates at convention stands. I no longer regarded the plastic casing around the windows as either inevitable or natural, but as the patiently refined result of a manufacturing process once agreed upon by two men on a podium with flags in front of them, captured by a photographer from Flight Daily News.
Half a year later, I was invited to give a lecture at California State University in Bakersfield, a two-hour drive north of where I was staying in Los Angeles. It was my intention to complete the round trip in a day, but as I headed out of Bakersfield in the middle of the afternoon – after a lecture notable for its near-unanimous absence of attendees – I took a wrong exit, onto a divided motorway which funnelled me irrevocably in a south-easterly direction, into the Mojave Desert.
Signs of civilisation rapidly disappeared, ceding the field to a ceaseless repetition of barren lunar valleys – though to suggest that this landscape looked like the moon was unfairly to deflect responsibility for a bleakness which was patently not our neighbouring planet’s alone. Vultures circled overhead. Occasionally, after a few miles of terrain unaltered since the end of the last ice age, there would be renewed evidence of man’s presence, and hence a fresh opportunity to wonder at our species’ strangeness, especially our inclination to put up billboards even in the most desolate areas that read, ‘Great Fahitas, Low Prices’. There were scattered ruins, too: stone cabins missing their roofs and windows, crumbling slowly back into the desert, looking so ancient that it seemed inconceivable they could have been put up by gold prospectors only in the 1880s, rather than by a group of itinerant Roman legionnaires some centuries before the birth of Christ.
After an hour or two of driving in circles, furious at my own ineptitude, I surrendered hope of making it back to Los Angeles that day and pulled in at a motel in