THE AESTHETICS OF ELECTRICAL WIRES.

THE AESTHETICS OF ELECTRICAL WIRES. On our walks, I am aware of electrical wires only when a bird lands on one of them, and even then I look only at the bird. When I look at a landscape—if I imagine myself painting a landscape—there are no wires or poles. Alain de Botton devotes a chapter of THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK to a walk he took tracing the flow of electricity from a nuclear plant in Kent to a substation in London. He says: “Whereas our culture openly invites us to be aware of birds and historic churches, it places no comparable emphasis on pylons, despite the fact that they often rival, for ingenuity and beauty, many of the more established objects of our curiosity.” The chapter is illustrated with a number of photos of pylons in their landscapes. De Botton notes that on postcards—say, of castles—electricity lines are usually airbrushed out. He compares pylons to windmills, saying that “these early industrial objects” had not been appreciated by the Dutch until “the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age.”