The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [8]
If only security concerns were not so paramount in the imagination of its owners, the warehouse would make a perfect tourist destination, for observing the movement of lorries and products in the middle of the night induces a mood of distinctive tranquillity, it magically stills the demands of the ego and corrects any danger of looming too large in one’s own imagination. That we are each surrounded by millions of other human beings remains a piece of inert and unevocative data, failing to dislodge us from a self-centered day-to-day perspective, until we take a look at a stack of ten thousand ham-and-mustard sandwiches, all wrapped in identical plastic casings, assembled in a factory in Hull, made out of the same flawless cottony-white bread, and due to be eaten over the coming two days by an extraordinary range of our fellow citizens which these sandwiches promptly urge us to make space for in our inwardly focused imaginations.
This gargantuan granary is evidence that we have become, after several thousand years of effort, in the industrialised world at least, the only animals to have wrested ourselves from an anxious search for the source of the next meal and therefore to have opened up new stretches of time – in which we can learn Swedish, master calculus and worry about the authenticity of our relationships, avoiding the compulsive and all-consuming dietary priorities under which still labour the emperor penguin and Arabian oryx.
Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order – and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.
5.
Dominating the eastern end of the warehouse is an encyclopedic selection of the inhabitants of the world’s oceans. Stacked on shelves in the middle of the English countryside are mackerel icefish from Australia, red rock lobster from Mexico, hoki from New Zealand, mahimahi from Ecuador and monkfish from Costa Rica.
To consider the expressions of these creatures, with their faces by turns noble, gauche, ugly, wise and terrifying, is to be pulled from our ordinary agenda and made to acknowledge man’s co-proprietorship of the planet with some distinctive beings whom we have condemned to end their existence under rings of lemon because of no greater error on their part than the possession of a fleshy texture and a lack of small bones.
How did the fish find their way here? How did they die? Who made the packaging? And, more imaginatively, what might a painter discover in rendering a mackerel’s skin or an engineer in examining a red rock lobster’s claws? Implicit in these questions is a broader failure to appreciate the interest and incidental beauty of the working world.
I notice a shelf stacked deep with fresh tuna steaks. ‘Caught by line in the Maldives’ says the wrapper, a claim as concise and tantalising as an epitaph on a gravestone. That fish taken out of the water several continents away could in a matter of hours be here in a warehouse in Northamptonshire is evidence of nothing short of logistical genius, based on a complex interplay of technology, managerial discipline and legal and economic standardisation.
It is the almost conspiratorial silence regarding this achievement that intrigues and provokes me – and with time gives birth to a desire to seize hold of a fish and follow it, at a somewhat more leisurely pace, backwards into the