The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

Human beings, once segregated into dietary categories almost as strongly as by religious ones, into the peoples of rice or of wheat, of potatoes or of maize, now fill their stomachs with unthinking promiscuity.

At the top of a slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through – and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one’s own alienation.

We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.

It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.

In charge of these processes are engineers who have successfully stamped out their natural laziness to master the austere dilemmas of chemistry and physics, people who may have spent twenty years specialising in the storage of flammable solvents or the reaction of wood pulp to water vapour – and in their leisure time, leaf through the Hazardous Cargo Bulletin, the world’s only monthly magazine dedicated to the safe handling and transport of oils and chemicals.

is no less worthy of record for that

leave no trace in the public mind