Work as a Distraction

la lecture
Henri Fantin Latour

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 proposition, 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 error, is really life itself coursing through us. [...]


To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meeting as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break', to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle - maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. [...]


Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.


Alain de Botton,  The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work



맞는 말이라고 연신 고개를 주억거리긴 했지만
나의 경우
하고 있는 일이 중요하게 생각될만큼 잠깐의 집중력도 없는 듯하다.
오히려 '일'이라고 하는 그것들이
너무 일관성있게 그렇지 않다고 생각되어서 문제고
그렇다면 그것보다 중요하다고 생각되는 것을
구별된 시간에 하자니
퇴근 후 나의 몸과 마음 상태는
위 책 8장에서 한 퇴근하는 회사원의 전형적인 하루의 마감과 비슷하게 되어
결국 어떤 채워지지 않는 상태를 계속
벌고 있다고 할 수 있다.



The flat is quiet and guilty. [...] He notices the bath towel thrown hastily over the sofa after the morning shower. The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.


For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol. The final approach will be made under the benign guidance of a Chilean Cabernet and the hypnotic, entirely untroubling retelling of the day's misdemeanours and cataclysms on the evening news.