One of the reasons we’ve made Lost Art Press books as durable as possible might seem silly. Perhaps it is the result of growing up in the Cold War, but I’ve always worried that human civilization is on the brink of collapse.
And after that happens – whether it’s from war, climate or economics – people will need to build things without the help of YouTube or television. Maybe our books (which have already endured floods, babies and dog attacks), will survive as well.
Lately, however, my morning walks into Cincinnati have changed my mind.
Just about every morning I walk along a stretch of the Ohio River that features a geologic timeline of earth’s history from 450 million years ago until the settlement of Cincinnati in 1788. Each tile in the path is about 36” x 36” and can be covered in a single stride. And each tile represents 1 million years. Some of the tiles are decorated with the animals that developed during this period (227 million years ago: The first mammals are 6 in. shrew-like animals) or what was happening with the climate or the continents.
The entirety of human history is covered in the last of the 450-plus tiles. It’s a sobering thought to consider our lives and our work against such a grand clock. Even if you build things from solid stone, they are no match for time on this scale. Building a chair with excellent joinery so it might last 200 years suddenly seems laughable. In 1 million years, everything we know will all be dust anyway.
If this sounds like I’m headed down a path to existential despair, you’re wrong.
On the whole, I consider humanity to be a generally greedy, selfish and destructive force. But we are all capable of good. For me, the two most important things I can do are: Take care of others and create things that are beautiful. By “beauty,” I don’t mean the stuff in art museums, the books in our libraries or the soaring buildings in our cities. I mean the small (and big) things that we do everyday.
Beauty can be a rude chair that is nice to sit in and draws your eye from the other side of the room. It can be a handplaned surface. A moulding that creates bands of light and dark. A song that is sung at the end of a day’s work. A meal that you make for your family.
All these things are temporary; some last only an instant. But these bits of immediate and ordinary beauty (what you see, taste, smell and feel) make a moment – perhaps the one you are in right now – better than moments without them.
This beauty does not require a particular talent or decades of training to create. This is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to vernacular furniture and architecture, outsider art, folk music, folk cooking. Anyone can do it. Anyone. Even if I’m making a chair from Curtis Buchanan’s pen, singing a song by Ralph Stanley or making a recipe from the Lee Brothers, the act of creating it (or creating it again) is what keeps me in love with life.
If you are a cynic, you might think this blog entry is my way of explaining that we are going to stop sewing the signatures of our books. Or quit using the fiber tape that reinforces the casebinding. Or heck, we’re just gonna have monkeys read our books out loud on YouTube. After all, it’s all going to be dust as soon as the earth steps forward onto the next tile.
But no. I think that making something well – even if it lasts just an instant on the geologic timeline – is a form of beauty and brings pleasure or delight to others (as it does to me).
Gotta go. I’ve got some leather scraps that need to be riveted together into something that – I hope – will bring joy to a man in California and a man in Idaho.
— Christopher Schwarz
Godspeed, mon ami! You hit the nail on the existential head of issue at hand. What do we do NOW? Please forgive me for this but, I was raised in a Southern evangelical family. We are steeped in and aimed at the hereafter. Personally I don’t give two shiite’s about the hereafter. The NOW is all we will ever have and doing good work has to count. Belief in Jesus is fine, I cling to his “example” and not what others have said or “believe.” There are sound reasons for this but I won’t bore anyone with them. Suffice to say, I get you. Control what you can, know thyself and adjust accordingly. People are counting on us to do the right thing. So why not just get on with it and take the joy in the moment and pass it on when you can. Someone else could use it about NOW.
Just a thought: Do you think part of it may be loosely tied to “leaving your mark?”
My father-in-law is obsessed with genealogy. He’s purchased all kinds of books, done the ancestry.com thing and has written his own version of the family’s historical timeline, dating back to the Russian dynasty. He was very proud of it – and made copies for everyone. In the end, it was just his way of letting the world know he was here.
The older I get, the more I feel the need to scratch this itch as well. What will become of the furniture I built? Will my kids fight over them when I’m gone? Will my sons want to have dad’s old tools?
The world is going to end in fire. Your books are toast dude. lol
” I consider humanity to be a generally greedy, selfish and destructive force.”
Well, the timeline appears to go downhill, which suggests the belief is not unique.
There’s nothing like some finite perspective to mark the passage of one year to the next. Even if it’s for the 450-millionth time (at least on this particular rock, third from one in a hundred billion stars in the galaxy.) How insignificant is the life of just one man and yet what could matter more? Happy New Year, Mr. Schwarz & Co.; may it be just one of many, many more for you and for all.
Your meditative post reminded me of George Carling’s Saving The Planet routine which ends with the phrase: “Thanks for being here with me for a little while tonight.”
I’m sure that the beautiful chairs you built will provide immediate and lasting joy to their recipients.
We should be selfish when we create. If we happen to please others, so be it.
This it exactly why I follow this blog. Well said.
Is there a tile about Keith Richards?
It’s right after Willie Nelson’s.
Kind ladies and kind gentlemen
Soon I will be gone
But let me just warn you all
Before I do pass on
Stay free from petty jealousies
Live by no man’s code
And hold your judgment for yourself
Lest you wind up on this road
Homo Sapiens has inhabited this planet for a few seconds in the hypothetical one hour that comprises earth’s existence. If we have in our stupidly, greed and carelessness made the planet untenable for our own future survival, that will only be one more extinction in millions of years of such events. Our brand of intelligence has made us victims of an arrogance that has allowed us to think we are the culmination of the planet’s plan, that we are the zenith of so-called creation. Not so. Life will go on without us and we will not be missed. That is not to say that intelligent life did not exist on this planet a billion or two years ago and disappeared without a trace, or that it will not evolve again here in future eons. There is nothing despairing about such thoughts, only that it does not measure up to our egotistical opinion of ourselves as creatures. Even if we were not destructive by nature, we could be the planet’s angelic ultimate gift and still be snuffed out in an instant by a meteor or succumb to a plague not of our making. What is in our control is contributing what we can to the welfare of everyone we contact, doing no evil as far as we can be aware.
I sit here next to the cabinet displaying my antique tool collection going back two hundred years and wonder what creative hands employed them, and what still survives that came from their labors and visions.
I grew up during the cold war as well. Do you remember time capsules? I think we even made one as a class in elementary or junior high, “just in case”. Could throw a copy of ATC in one, translated into Esperanto.
Yeah, we did that in fifth grade. Pretty morbid exercise. I can’t remember what I contributed.
What ever happens, please take care of my cherished cutting edges.
WOW!
What is amazing to me is that whenever certain members of humanity have indeed fomented some kind of destruction of human civilization or civility, there are others who actively seek to rediscover or rebuild what was destroyed. As if the need to not just move on, but to move up is baked in to what makes us human.
It is important to leave a history that can be built upon, but it is just as important to hold a history that is part of the build.
Well said
Good to hear you don’t intend interfering with my growing collection of beautiful LAP books. They’re like my prized tools. Every now and then I like to hold and flick through them. Similarly, I collect them in part from fear the internet (and society as we know it) will someday break down. It’s comforting to know there are other woodworking ‘preppers‘ out there.
I would immediately subscribe to a YouTube channel that has monkeys reading woodworking books.
I don’t think that we have the capacity to really appreciate the vastness of time and our place as humanity in the universe. Even considering that we are the result of multiple mass extinctions on the earth and that even a million years from now the earth will be a vastly different place with completely different continent formations…also not considering that the sun will destroy the earth in 2 billion years or the universe will die from the heat death of entropy approx. 13 billion years from now…
I’m happy to continue woodworking even knowing that 2 billion years from now the sun will destroy everything I’ve made, regardless of what glue I used or whether I used waterstones or oil stones to sharpen.
Beautiful Chris …
“On the whole, I consider humanity to be a generally greedy, selfish and destructive force. But we are all capable of good.”
There’s truth in that. One response to it is to try to remember the following: Do what you want as long as you are not hurting anybody else and for the good of your soul, do somebody a favour now and then, especially when you are not obliged to.
Something that might expand your thoughts even more. longnow.org
Thanks, Chris, for that, well said.
Happy New Year to you and your family, everyone at Lost Art Press, and all of the wood workers out there. Peace.
“The world will be saved by beauty.” -Dostoevsky (and Dorothy Day)
One beautiful thing that we could do, similar to sending out the golden platters on Voyagers I and II, is create many titanium or similar metal plaques in the most likely geological places in the hopes that the next sentient creatures to evolve on this livable planet might learn from our hubris and destruction of the biosphere and not make the same mistakes.
There is no proper definition for beauty but the picture have shown in this blog are really interesting.
Sounds like a case for everyday aesthetics! Very thoughtful piece and a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly – finding beauty in the immediate and the ordinary.