Below is a quotation from a book ( The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton ) I'm reading with Kai, one of the students I tutor.
"I left Symons's office company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fullfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are."
It's a book about eight difference professions and the characteristics, descriptions and actualities of such a job. It's cool. Kai is imaging new possibilities for himself instead of being beleaguered by math problems.
1 poem I wrote as a Poet :: I'm quiet sure there was pleasure and sorrow while writing it.
Sheila didn’t want to die on Thursdays anymore.She wouldn’t buy paper towels if that would get her off the hook.
She knew their effects on chickens.
They were squished already.
No one heard them anymore.
And no one cleaned up behind them.
They were alone in a world that ate them all up.
Wednesdays enlivened her to the future, so you couldn’t count on them.
Sheila likened the mid week to bacon, full of fat and juice and crispness that grounded her body in death.
She knew her kids well by that day.
Still no one cleaned up behind them and her husband laid waiting for her still.
She couldn’t get out alive so instead she wrote fiction and listened to the harmonica her neighbor played on Friday mornings before his gigs that evening.
In dark bars where she knew her longings could never be quenched.
She wallowed in the dark enough and grew silent late at night checking her locked doors.
What do you do in the hope of full pleasure no sorrow?
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