The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [80]
Identifying a TWA plane which had lost both its cockpit and its wheels, I climbed up into the fuselage and arranged myself in seat 1C, a royal-blue executive chair with a large stain in the middle of its lower cushion. It was seven in the evening but still bright and agreeably warm. I wanted to press the call button and order a Coke from the stewardess, who was perhaps now dead. I noticed that a few rows behind me, the emergency oxygen masks had dropped down from the overhead compartment. They had done so not in the gruesome accident one associates them with, when the engines are on fire and the emergency slide lies tumescent around the main door, the ladies having grown too troubled to remember to remove their high-heeled shoes, but simply through the slow erosion of their spring catches. Perhaps we are always more likely to die like this, without particular drama, without firemen in smoke hoods and foam on the runway, without the comfort of a collective accident and the sympathy of newscasters, but through an insipidly slow process of disintegration, the masks only gradually wearing loose and swinging idly in the desert wind, witnessed by rattlesnakes and shy and incontinent desert tortoises.
My thoughts turned to the people who had built and animated these machines, the employees who had exchanged business cards at Le Bourget at the Paris air show of 1968, who had made the Bakelite intercom phones in Trenton, New Jersey, followed the expansion of Eastern Airlines and, in a factory near Calgary, fashioned the blankets which were now disappearing into the Mojave dust. I thought, too, of the captain, and of the flirtatious remarks he might have exchanged with the stewardess who brought his dinner in to him on a tin-foil-covered tray during a trip down to the Caribbean in 1971, the same year Idi Amin came to power and John Newcombe won his third Wimbledon. I imagined his gold braided cap and his aviator glasses, his tanned, bristly arms, his descent towards the tarmac at Kingston and his purple and magenta room overlooking the pool of the newly opened Sunseeker Club near the airport.
How improbable the thought of his own death would have seemed to him, how contrary to his aerobic body and acute mind. There would have been few reminders or signs that there were a finite number of times that his knees would comfortably bend to pick up a suitcase, that eventually even his most basic thoughts would become too arduous for him to connect, that he was working his way through the ten thousand days still allocated to him and that the small daily jolts of anxiety he experienced when dealing with congestion at O’Hare or bad weather over the Gulf of Mexico would one morning reach critical mass in the form of a sudden and definitive tightening in the chest in a driveway in a Phoenix suburb.
Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done: it seems not so much taboo as unlikely. Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and we should be grateful to it for precisely that reason, for allowing us to mingle ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful lightness, as mere intellectual propositions, while we travel to Paris to sell engine oil. We function on the basis of a necessary myopia. Therein is the sheer energy of existence, a blind will no less impressive than that which we find in a moth arduously crossing a window ledge, stepping around a dollop of paint left by a too-hasty brush, refusing to contemplate the broader scheme in which he will be dead by nightfall.
The arguments for our triviality and vulnerability are too obvious, too well known and too tedious to rehearse. What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity even when their wider non-sense is clear. The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual