Alain de Botton

I'd never heard of him. Not surprising, really. It's not like I read deeply or even a lot anymore (other than blogs and the Bible for PTC and newspapers).

Ali invited me to a talk, which I declined because I wasn't feeling well. And then while in Melbourne, Karen raved about his talk.

I was intrigued, because a lot of the stuff she was talking about was related to my study in management and leadership in my Masters. Then we were shopping for the non-begotten dress in Melbourne, and I ran out of Big Issue to distract me. So I went and bought the very last copy in the bookstore.


So now, I have some lovely tidbits to share with you. Look away now if you don't want to read these quotes.


From "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" by Alain de Botton.

When talking to a marketing executive at a biscuit factory:
"I wondered aloud to Renae why in our society the greatest sums of money so often tended to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things, and why the dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity at the heart of the Industrial Revolution so seldom extended beyond the provision of commonplace material goods like shampoo or condoms, oven-gloves or lingerie. I told Renae that our robots and engines were delivering the lion's share of their benefits at the base of our pyramid of needs, that we were evident experts at swiftly assembling confectionery and yet we were still searching for reliable means of generating emotional stability or marital harmony. Renae had little to add to this analysis. A terrified expression spread across her features and she asked if I might excuse her."
(emphasis mine)

On choosing a career or changing what we do:
"Extraordinary resilience, intelligence and good fortune are needed to redraw the map of our reality, while on either side of the summits of greatness are arrayed the endless foothills populated by the tortured celibates of achievement".

On staying in French Guiana in a "hotel":
"... on returning to the room late at night, it was not uncommon to be confronted by a muscular and implausibly furry spider standing stationary on the wall above the television, a situation resolved by a Creole maintenance man who dispatched the monster with a decisive slap of rolled-up newspaper, leaving nothing but a brown sediment to commemorate the presence, then tossed the corpse off the balcony and, with apparent sincerity, bade one a pleasant end to the evening."

On rocket fuel and rocket launching:
"Prompted by a question from the Hong Kong television presenter, but chary of the sensationalist tenor of her enquiry, Dr Proudhon paused for a moment to consider what might 'go wrong', responding with all the austerity of a chemistry teacher reviewing the risks of the Bunsen burner before an assembly of excited pupils. He explained that if the propellant paste were incorrectly mixed in such a way that it retained air pockets, it could produce a sudden increase in the surface area of flammable material and a corresponding rise in exhaust gases, which might well have the power to rupture the casing of the rocket and cause an explosion equivalent in its short-term destructive force to that of a small nuclear device. But, he added to reassure - and thereby also, inadvertently, to disappoint - his audience, there was only a 0.2 percent chance of such an incident's occurring on any given launch."

On the location of a crap-apple tree:
"The commuter traffic is impatient and quick to anger. Near the train station, an old crab-apple tree stands in the middle of the roundabout, an unlikely survivor of the roadworks which made off with its fellows."

On the physics and symbols used in electrical transmission engineering:
"I was struck by how impoverished ordinary language can be in contrast, requiring its user to arrange inordinate numbers of words in tottering and unstable piles in order to communicate meanings infinitely more basic than anything related to an electrical network. I found myself wishing that the rest of mankind would follow the engineers' example and agree on a series of symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and often painful psychological states - a code which might help us to feel less tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and silent exchanges of equations. .... If only a letter could have been identified, for example, with which elegantly to allude to the strange desire one occasionally has to elicit love from people one does not even particularly like (beta, say)"

On the viewpoint of an accountant:
"It is apparent that accountancy lends its practitioners a particular way of looking at the world. The accountants ask me not how or why one writes a book, but whether tax on a title is payable across a few years or must wholly be paid at the moment of publication. They are like renal surgeons for whom one is first and foremost always a kidney."

On travelling in the Mojave desert:
"Signs of civilisation rapidly disappeared, ceding the field to a ceaseless repetition of barren lunar valleys - though to suggest that this landscape looked like the moon was unfairly to deflect responsibility for a bleakness which was patently not our neighbouring planet's alone."

On staying at a motel with a pool:
"Unfortunately, most of the budget for the pool had apparently been squandered on proclaiming - in an enormous illuminated display on the roadside - that it existed, leaving few resources for it actually to do so. It was the minimum size to qualify as a pool before it would have to be recategorised as a bath."

It's a book that if you enjoyed the above quotes, you should read. But not my book. I'm lending it to Karen and Bec first. Now I want to read more of his books.