The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder. They fix that which is fugitive: the cooling shadow of an oak on a windless, hot summer afternoon; the golden-brown tint of leaves in the early days of autumn; the stoical sadness of a bare tree glimpsed from a train, outlined against a heavy grey sky. At the same time, it is forgotten aspects of our own psyches to which paintings can seem mysteriously conjoined. It can be our unspolen longings that surprise us in the trees, and our adolescent selves that we recognize in the hazy tint of a summer sky." --Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 2009