Toil, toil

摘要

Alain de botton is a British essayist, novelist and, if one uses the term somewhat expansively, philosopher. Over the past decade or so he has cast a world-weary eye over travel, status and architecture, as well as writing a fine book about philosophers and an excellent meditation on Proust. His new book, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work", takes on that odd thing that most of us do for so many of our waking hours on Earth.rnIt would be easy to accuse Mr de Botton, who describes his new volume as "a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace", of firing cheap shots. It is, after all, a simple matter to find any number of ridiculous employments if one wishes to skew one's analysis of work in that direction. His choice, for instance, of the design, marketing and manufacture of Moments, a British biscuit composed of chocolate and shortcake, is an easy target. So too is the man whose main enthusiasm is cataloguing the structural characteristics of electricity pylons.