Books &Life Entropy | 02 Jul 2009
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Wish to share review of recent Book by Alain de Botton whose work I have greatly admired. His previous books includes - The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life. This is lyrical, erudite look at our world of work.
We spend most of our waking lives at work–in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people wake up to do each day–and night–to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art–in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.
Along the way he tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can ask about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? And why do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also the planet? Characteristically lucid, witty and inventive, Alain de Botton’s “song for occupations” is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life which is all too often ignored and a book that shines a revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives.
What keeps us reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is not so much the peek into cloistered industrial zones exposed by de Botton’s reporting as the freshness of his observations and the ironic bite of his language. Of a particularly bleak tea shop along the electrical route, he comments, “How cheerful one would have needed to be in such a place in order not to regret existence.” He likens accountants’ “labyrinthine craft” to “numerical needlework” and admires that they “have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit.” He wonders whether inventors, who must demonstrate “a judicious fusion of the utopian and the practical,” are perhaps blessed with “a superior capacity for dissatisfaction” that propels them to come up with novel solutions to life’s problems.
Work itself is a solution to many of life’s problems — not just in providing financial wherewithal but distraction from greater anxieties, including mortality. Or, as the 19th-century Kansas poet Ironquill wrote:
Work brings its own relief
He who most idle is
Has most of grief.
Enjoy..
© Compiled from B&N and Pantheon Books Editorial Reviews.
on 02 Jul 2009 at 1:53 pm 1.Rajesh Kothari said …
I Can’t say much about the book, without reading it. But, I liked the poetry very much.
on 13 Jul 2009 at 12:40 pm 2.Anu said …
I think many more should read the book earlier in life…….. many of us are not CONSCIOUS in the choices we make because we do not think beyond a certain level …….it takes introspection and courage to find what you love to do and then to do it………….