How to Take Your Time by Alain de Botton

Author:Alain de Botton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

Unfortunately, the very artistry of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Flaubert has the tendency to suggest that it would have been apparent even from a news-in-brief that there was something signifìcant about Romeo, Anna, and Emma, something which would have led any right-thinking person to see that these were characters fit for great literature or a show at the Globe, whereas of course there would have been nothing to distinguish them from the somersaulting horse in Villeurbanne or the electrocuted Marcel Peigny in Aube. Hence Proust’s assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter. And hence his associated claim that everything is potentially a fertile subject for art and that we can make discoveries as valuable in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal’s Pensées.

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623, and was recognized from an early age—and by more than just his proud family—to be a genius. By twelve, he had worked out the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid; he went on to invent the mathematics of probability; he measured atmospheric pressure, constructed a calculating machine, designed an omnibus, got tuberculosis, and wrote the brilliant and pessimistic series of aphorisms in defense of Christian belief known as the Pensées.

It should come as no surprise to discover things of value in the Pensées. They are written with seductive immediacy, broaching topics of universal concern with modern succinctness. “We do not choose as captain of a ship the most highly born of those aboard,” runs one aphorism, and we can admire the dry irony of this protest against inherited privilege, which must have been so galling in the unmeritocratic society of Pascal’s day. The habit of putting people into important offices simply because they had important parents is quietly ridiculed in an analogy between statecraft and navigation: Pascal’s readers might have been intimidated and silenced by an aristocrat’s elaborate argument that he had a divine right to determine economic policy, even though he had failed to master the upper reaches of the seven-times table, but they would be unlikely to swallow a similar argument from him if he knew nothing of sailing and was proposing to take the wheel on a journey around the Cape of Good Hope.

How frothy soap looks beside this. How far we have drifted from the spiritual realm with this long-haired maiden, clutching her bosom in rapture at the thought of her toilet soap, handily kept with the necklaces in a padded jewelry box.

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