It will be preserved of more serious trouble

Alain de Botton is a rare essayist, a kind of postmodern Montaigne, who likes to dip his pen in ink of our more mundane daily and more austere, for the re-enchanting and/or the mobbed. With "Splendours and miseries of the work" the English writer (born in Zurich, he lives in London) tackles the world of business, his divine rules, its cathedrals of glass, steel and concrete. With irony, with elegance, with philosophy, it attempts to detect the poetry in the air of the high-tech offices and giant warehouses, humanity in the disembodied actions of the production chain.

Why is work, which occupies most of the time of the men, and who is supposed to bring them happiness, angry with literature - from the beauty of the world Alain de Botton, in the first chapter, is fascinated by a group of employees who watch a cargo back the dreamy air, as if it was a magical appearance, of a work of art Thames. Therefore, all is not lost... His immersion in the world of work is a series of incongruous and humorous travel sectors the most various industry and services - in black and white photos in support. Fascinated by these giant warehouses located on the outskirts of cities, he is interested first in logistics. Noting that no one really knows originates from the products it consumes, he decided thus trace the journey of a fish in the seas of the South to our base. Alain de Botton then associated us with the manufacture of a biscuit of United Biscuit to a female population. While criticizing a division of the excessive work, lose any meaning to the task of each, the philosopher recognizes that the productivity race is a matter of survival for executives and their employees in global competition.

A perfect bubble

The great success of the book lies in the constant tension between the "economic horror" implementation (or social) and human logic (the need to survive, evolve, to, or simply the time). Thus his "grand tour" of the London headquarters of an auditing company is both fierce, surrealist and tender. Alain de Botton is always trying to emphasize humans in that it crosses and officials who, by mistrust or habit, handle the language. There are literally cosmic passages, as the visit to Aerospatiale in Kourou to the last orbit of a Japanese satellite by the rocket Ariane. Other squarely Poetics, as the chapter devoted to a painter of landscapes, or the telling his hiking "electric" on a high voltage line. But sometimes the writer to prevail against the hypocrisy of the liberal discourse.

"Splendours and miseries...". "is ends on a melancholy visit the Paris air show and this general reflection of a very relative optimism:"our work will have at least entertained us, will have provided us a perfect bubble in which invest our hopes, it has concentrated our immeasurable anxieties on some relatively modest objectives and achievable, it will have given us the sense of control over the situation. "It will be reasonably made us tired, he will have filled our plates. It will be preserved of more serious trouble.