The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"In Catholic dogma, the definition of noble work had mostly been limited to that done by priests in the service of God, with practical and commercial labour relegated to an entirely base category unconnected to the display of any specifically Christian virtues. By contrast, the Protestant worldview as it had developed over the sixteenth century attempted to redeem the value of everyday tasks, proposing that many apparently unimportant activities could in fact enable those who undertook them to convey the quality of their souls. In this schema, humility, wisdom, respect, and kindness could be practised in a shop no less sincerely than in a monastery." --Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 2009

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs, but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves." --Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 2009

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

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"Nevertheless, no quayside can ever appear entirely banal, because people will always be miniscule compared to the great oceans and the mention of faraway ports will hence always bear a confused promise of lives unfolding there which may be more vivid than the ones we know here, a romantic charge clinging to names like Yokohama, Alexandria, and Tunis -- places which in reality cannot be exempt from tedium and compromise, but which are distant enough to support for a time certain confused daydreams of happiness." --Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 2009