[M]any contemporary writers are notably silent about a key area of our lives: our work ….
It used to be a central ambition of novelists to capture the experience of working life. From Balzac to Zola, Dickens to Kafka, they evoked the dynamism and the beauty, the horror and the tedium of the workplace. Their books covered the same territory as is today featured at copious length in the financial pages of newspapers or in the breathless commentaries of the 24-hour newscasters, but their interest was not primarily financial. The goal was to convey the human side of commerce, where money is only one actor in a complex drama about our ambitions and reversals ….
We need an art that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty, and horror of the workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.
via Alain de Botton, It’s time for an ambitious new literature of the workplace – The Boston Globe.
