The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Author:Alain de Botton [Botton, Alain de]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non Fiction, Psychology
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

13.

A little more than a week after my return home, the Lockheed Martin satellite successfully entered its orbit, joining the hundreds of others which necklace the earth. It now beams down images of WOWOW TV’s programmes across Japan, from where it can sometimes be seen on a clear night, impersonating one of nature’s stars.

1.

Stephen Taylor has spent much of the last two years in a wheat field in East Anglia repeatedly painting the same oak tree under a range of different of lights and weathers. He was out in two feet of snow last winter and this summer, at three in the morning, he lay on his back tracing the upper branches of the tree by the light of a solstice moon.

On a typical summer’s day, this unknown middle-aged artist is loading his car, ready for work, by seven in the morning. He lives in a dilapidated terraced house in the centre of Colchester, a town of one hundred thousand inhabitants, ninety kilometres north-east of London. His sagging, dented Citroën has reached a stage of decrepitude so advanced that it seems set for immortality. Across the back seats, strewn as if the vehicle had just been involved in a head-on collision, are canvases, easels, insect repellant, old sandwiches, a bag of brushes and a box of paints. There is also a suitcase jammed with scarves and jumpers, for outdoor painters tend to know the story of how Cézanne caught a chill one morning while painting a sparrow in a field in Aix-en-Provence – and was dead by sunset.

The road out of Colchester leads Taylor past a fractured landscape of warehouses and building sites. The commuter traffic is impatient and quick to anger. Near the train station, an old crab-apple tree stands in the middle of a roundabout, an unlikely survivor of the roadworks which made off with its fellows. Eight miles west of town, Taylor turns off the main road and starts down a little-used farm track. Waist-high stalks bow and disappear beneath the front bumper, like hair through a comb. Taylor finds his usual parking place and, fifteen metres from the tree, arranges his base camp in a clearing in the wheat.

The oak is estimated to be 250 years old. It was therefore already home to skylarks and starlings when Jane Austen was a baby and George III the ruler of the American colonies.

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