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The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
By Alain de Botton
(Pantheon Books; 326 pages; $26)
Shop Class as Soul Craft An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
By Matthew B. Crawford
(Penguin; 246 pages; $25.95)
Elaine Margolin, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Alain de Botton's new philosophical treatise, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work," feels like an intellectual acid trip without the stimulants. He focuses your gaze where you have never even considered looking and turns upside down your notions of beauty and love and work and what really is involved in crafting a meaningful life. The book is groundbreaking in approach, style and imagination.
De Botton, author of "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and "Status Anxiety," travels anywhere and everywhere. On foot, he hikes with a friend throughout an entire city, following the power lines that connect one place to another until they disappear underground. He visits an enormous food processing plant and listens quietly as two women chat aimlessly while working the assembly line. He watches the huge cargo ships that travel the seas, and as he moves from one location to another, he strategically places stark black-and-white photographs of what he is witnessing on random pages; we can see what he is looking at with our own eyes, and then his, until somehow it seems as if we are doing it together.
De Botton relishes the ingeniousness and complexity and size of man-made machinery and feels saddened that most of us go through our lives in a state of semi-oblivion about the mechanical workings of the world. Most of us "know nothing about the gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy as only a set of numbers, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves close acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable."
In one profile, he chronicles the life of a painter who has spent close to a decade making paintings of the same huge oak tree over and over again, from different angles and with different colors during different times of the year. The artist attempts to explain to de Botton his obsession with the tree, his belief being that if he is able to master it on canvas, he will be able to achieve a longed-for sense of majesty and transcendence in his own unnoticed life. We feel de Botton's envy of the artist growing, and then our own, as we witness a man most of us would pass on the street without glancing at consumed by a secret passion that lifts him from despair.
Matthew Crawford's book, "Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work," seems to have channeled the wisdom of de Botton and put it to practical use in his own life.
Crawford was raised on a California commune and as a young man worked as an electrician's apprentice. He eventually found his way to the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in political philosophy, followed by a high-paying job at a think tank. But only five months into his career, he abandoned it and opened a motorcycle restoration business.
Like de Botton's artist, Crawford spends an absurd number of hours renovating old motorcycles for customers who can't bear to throw them away. The motorcycles have become for their owners symbols of their fantasies and hopes, perhaps memories of their fading youth, and Crawford approaches each restoration with the tenderness of a doctor, the skilled hands of a mechanic and a poet's soul. When he is working on a motorcycle, he is completely energized by the task before him; the analysis, the physical labor, the sensual joy that comes with working with his hands.
Like de Botton, Crawford has written an unusual and compelling book that seduces us to succumb to the passions that are dormant within us, begging for release.
Elaine Margolin is a book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...DDO1183P0F.DTL
By Alain de Botton
(Pantheon Books; 326 pages; $26)
Shop Class as Soul Craft An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
By Matthew B. Crawford
(Penguin; 246 pages; $25.95)
Elaine Margolin, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Alain de Botton's new philosophical treatise, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work," feels like an intellectual acid trip without the stimulants. He focuses your gaze where you have never even considered looking and turns upside down your notions of beauty and love and work and what really is involved in crafting a meaningful life. The book is groundbreaking in approach, style and imagination.
De Botton, author of "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and "Status Anxiety," travels anywhere and everywhere. On foot, he hikes with a friend throughout an entire city, following the power lines that connect one place to another until they disappear underground. He visits an enormous food processing plant and listens quietly as two women chat aimlessly while working the assembly line. He watches the huge cargo ships that travel the seas, and as he moves from one location to another, he strategically places stark black-and-white photographs of what he is witnessing on random pages; we can see what he is looking at with our own eyes, and then his, until somehow it seems as if we are doing it together.
De Botton relishes the ingeniousness and complexity and size of man-made machinery and feels saddened that most of us go through our lives in a state of semi-oblivion about the mechanical workings of the world. Most of us "know nothing about the gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy as only a set of numbers, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves close acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable."
In one profile, he chronicles the life of a painter who has spent close to a decade making paintings of the same huge oak tree over and over again, from different angles and with different colors during different times of the year. The artist attempts to explain to de Botton his obsession with the tree, his belief being that if he is able to master it on canvas, he will be able to achieve a longed-for sense of majesty and transcendence in his own unnoticed life. We feel de Botton's envy of the artist growing, and then our own, as we witness a man most of us would pass on the street without glancing at consumed by a secret passion that lifts him from despair.
Matthew Crawford's book, "Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work," seems to have channeled the wisdom of de Botton and put it to practical use in his own life.
Crawford was raised on a California commune and as a young man worked as an electrician's apprentice. He eventually found his way to the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in political philosophy, followed by a high-paying job at a think tank. But only five months into his career, he abandoned it and opened a motorcycle restoration business.
Like de Botton's artist, Crawford spends an absurd number of hours renovating old motorcycles for customers who can't bear to throw them away. The motorcycles have become for their owners symbols of their fantasies and hopes, perhaps memories of their fading youth, and Crawford approaches each restoration with the tenderness of a doctor, the skilled hands of a mechanic and a poet's soul. When he is working on a motorcycle, he is completely energized by the task before him; the analysis, the physical labor, the sensual joy that comes with working with his hands.
Like de Botton, Crawford has written an unusual and compelling book that seduces us to succumb to the passions that are dormant within us, begging for release.
Elaine Margolin is a book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...DDO1183P0F.DTL
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