"The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"

[fiefoe]

Biscuit makers / a painter:

• Biscuits are nowadays a branch of psychology,
• In the hands of an experienced branding expert, decisions about width, shape, coating, packaging and name can furnish a biscuit with a personality as subtly and appropriately nuanced as that of a protagonist in a great novel.
• The minders of the Ginger Nut and the Rich Tea of the Jaffa Cake and the Moment, resembled a flock of patient, grave-faced courtiers ministering to the needs of a nursery of willful infant emperors.
• (Survival) simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all too easily confused with clownishness.
• ... 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.
• We are now deep in the era of the technological sublime.
• We have learned to feel respect for circuit  boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.
• ... anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

__ Taylor is tormented by a sense of responsibility for the appearance of things. He can be kept awake at night by what he sees as an injustice in the colour of wheat or an uneasy fault line between two patches of sky.
__ It was Titian's Man with a Quilled Sleeve (1510) that taught Taylor how to paint leaves.
__ .. the way Titian succeeded in suggesting an expanse of fabric at once weighty and airy

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