Not long ago, I was standing in my home workshop, thinking to myself: “I really need to get serious about dust collection,” when it occurred to me how far I have come. If you’d told me two years ago that I’d become interested in woodworking, I wouldn’t even have laughed. I would have imagined that I had undergone some sort of “Regarding Henry”-style traumatic brain injury, rewiring my basic personality. Because that would have meant my morphing from the kind of person who looked down on using tools of any kind as little more exciting than vacuuming or cleaning a toilet to the kind of man who refers to his tablesaw as his “third child.” But it’s all true. I have become that man. And I do love my third child (“Bosch 4100”).
Come a long way? I certainly have.
For many years – say between the ages of First Consciousness and 41, I held the sort of attitude toward physical work that can best be described as a cross between “wanting to wish it away” and “just trying to dispatch with it with as little thought as possible.”
Why? I am not sure. Was it my education? I did take the required shop class in middle school, and I remember it being a not-unpleasant experience that I was not ill-suited for. But there was no further development ahead. The private high school I attended most decidedly did not have a shop class and surely would have regarded any suggestion that it should as though it were being proposed that the school should adopt a circus training program.
Over the years I certainly had cause to fix, build, and modify. But I would rush through it with an eye toward using whatever object I was supposed to be fixing – basic safety be damned. Once as I was floating in my kayak – upside-down – in the middle of Pillow Rock Rapid on the mighty Upper Gauley River in West Virginia, I found myself wondering why exactly I had neglected to finish gluing in several key components of the boat’s outfitting – such as the seat. Or why I had decided to secure the thigh straps – the only thing still holding me precariously inside my vessel – with little more than an old broom handle I’d found in the basement.
It was a mindset not only about manual work, but about materials and equipment in general – and about the physical world more broadly – a belief that the mark of a good kayaker (or skier, or pilot) was to possess enough physical skill that you could be indifferent to your gear. It was your body that was the important tool, the one worth investing in training and honing, not the boat, ski, paddle, or bike.
As for tools, what use did I have for them, beyond tinkering with kayaks? Fixing my car? No one does that. Repairing the house? I rented until I was 34. When I finally bought, it was a house that had just been lovingly restored. Even still, when the basement had water, I called a guy. When the chimney had a problem, I called a guy. Electrical circuits, water pipes, boilers, carburetors – there was no end to the things you could spend your time on. Just take the hit and pay for someone to fix it. Admit your limitations. Why bother at all?
But then something happened: I got old.
I’m not actually that old, but I am, let us just say, “high middle age.” By that, I mean that most of the time my back aches. I typically unwind at the end of the day by daydreaming about more comfortable furniture. Most of the chairs and couches we had – which had once seemed perfectly fine – now felt inadequate. My back needed more support, my feet more of a raise. The notion of a Platonic chair – a perfect “form” – kept coming to mind, a sort of asymptote of ideal physical relaxation for a man with just my height, just my dimensions. What would perfection feel like? The idea intrigued me: What I was dreaming about was surely a mere matter of math, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there a perfect height for one’s feet from the ground? A perfect seat height, and even type of cushion foam? Surely all of this was discoverable – perhaps even creatable – through trial and error? So one day I went out into the garage, took out the few tools I had, gathered some leftover scrap wood, and set about trying to build the perfect chair.
My first attempt was an Adirondack chair and I eschewed all practical advice (“the ideal angle of recline is between 90-100 inches” and so on) in favor of taking specific measurements of my every body part, like a tailor fitting for a bespoke suit. I wanted to make my own chair, and I wanted to make my own mistakes while doing it. Then it was on to the fascinating but haphazard project of trying to cut and screw the pieces of wood together. The result was austere and idiosyncratic – more like a postmodern “Munich chair” than anything from upstate New York. It wasn’t something that anyone else wanted to sit in – it had the effect of making you look like a marine who wanted to relax but couldn’t help sitting bolt upright. But it supported my back like a brick wall, and the process of creation, mistakes and all, was fun. That summer I built a whole parade of small tables, chairs, and small work benches, most of them primitive and rickety, but all of them (in my mind at least) moving closer to the asymptote.
There was something rewarding and demystifying about this process, a looking behind the curtain – or underneath the frame – of how everything around me – bookshelves, walls, desks, patios – was constructed. And it was not without precedent in my life. When I first met my wife, we would finish a lavish restaurant meal, and she would tell me: “We could make that at home.”
“You can’t just make that,” I’d respond. “That food was conjured by magic.”
“By who? That 20-year-old line cook who used to be the dish washer?” (Actually, she wouldn’t say this; she’d just look amusedly at me. I’d mentally fill in the line above.)
But sure enough, back home, she’d pick away at my favorite dish – “mediterranean chicken,” with sherry butter sauce, for instance – and after a few attempts what had once felt to me like in irreducible miracle of culinary creation suddenly proved itself to be, if not smoke and mirrors, then at least very much the work of man and not God, eminently replicable – usually just by adding a lot of butter.
This notion that everything – a complex meal, a well-made chair – can be broken down into its fundamentals, analyzed, thought through, and recreated (or modified) via a process of inquiry appealed to me on an intellectual level. It was similar to the idea that was increasingly asserting itself to me in my professional life – that by understanding key thinkers from the past, we could make sense of the unfamiliar and new.
And so did the notion of being able to quantify. Is there an explicit knowledge – a set of explicit rules – to each interaction with wood grain, with steel screws, with physical balance, or with aesthetic harmony? Can beauty be reduced, for instance to a number, to a specific sine curve function that rolls in just the right symmetrical fashion? It is a seductive way of thinking: the notion that truth is a mathematical ideal, a quantifiable — and perhaps therefore buildable — outcome.
It also fit in with something that really began to occur to me more and more as I became a “real” adult: that most things that you have to pay a high-priced specialist for are entirely doable by regular people – for a lot less money, and a lot more quickly.
I saw a cartoon once: A surgeon pulls his operating tools out of a patient halfway through surgery.
“Okay, that’s all the time I’ve got for now,” he says. “I’ll be back in a week or two to finish the job.”
The caption says: “Dr. Remley finally has the opportunity to perform surgery on the contractor who renovated his kitchen.”
Soon enough, I started not only trying to build the perfect furniture to prop up my aching back, but I started realizing I could fix door hinges, repair clapboards, install weatherstripping, even build a new cupboard in our kitchen. Yes, it was time- and money-saving, but there was more to it.
No less eminent a thinker than Karl Marx believed that what separates humans from animals, the true human essence – our “species being,” in his words – is our ability to manipulate our environment in a conscious way. In a famous passage in Kapital, he writes that although spiders and bees create webs and hives whose complexity puts human creations to shame, the spider and the bee do not do this by conscious design, while the human does. We create tools and use them to build consciously. We are homo faber – human-as-maker, man as the conscious manipulator of his environment.
And there is a sense in which to be able to manipulate your environment – to build a chair, to rip off and redo the trim in your house – is to lift out of depression, out of a helpless state, into a more empowering one – to take control of your own surroundings. It is a more adult stance – isn’t it? – than simply calling someone else to fix your property. And to have a tangible product at the end of the day is rewarding, as well – especially for someone like me whose job is intellectual and interpersonal — and often maddeningly non-tangible.
It all appeals, as well, to the Burkean within me. To own a home I think is an inherently conservative activity. It forces on us the desire to conserve: to tend, to keep clean or up to date, to remove the old and worn and to replace with the new and whole. One does not see problems with one’s siding and respond with the desire to raze the whole house and start building afresh (although sometimes one would like to). One replaces and repairs, updates, maintains. It is a reformer’s spirit, a Burkean spirit.
At every step in woodworking or carpentry there is wisdom from the past, crying out for you to obey it. Here, for instance, is the best angle of incline for chairs. Here are hard-and-fast heights for counters, widths for drawers, types of stain for coffee tables. And although I lean more toward Burke than to Marx, I usually do not listen. I do not like to use pre-specified plans when I build — because I feel that I learn more this way, by making my own mistakes. Most of the time what happens is that I start out on some eccentric and ill-advised design path — some rationalist fantasy — before hitting the inevitable wall and bending back with almost comical speed and efficiency toward the traditional and established.
To conserve, to tend, to steward: One of my dreams is to chainsaw trees on my land to use for firewood or to build furniture. A neighbor owns a sawmill and I would like to cut maple or ash trees up in the woods, pay him to cut them into rough boards, dry them in my workshop over the winter, and then plane and joint them from rough wood into beautiful straight boards, ready to compose a new desk or dresser. There is something about this that appeals to me deeply, to such an extent that it feels as though it is bigger than I am, that I am feeling something elemental and deeply human. It is not a simple desire for self-sufficiency — the need to sustain myself in the event of a lights-out cataclysmic event. Instead, it is a sense of stewardship over the land, a sense of cultivating, harvesting, and putting-to-use that appeals to some deep core of my being in a way I did not expect.
Shaping a piece of wood from something growing to something rough to something smooth and beautiful is a pleasure I don’t think I could have felt until I was middle-aged. It is an adult’s pleasure, a deferred pleasure, a long-term project pleasure. It is one thing to enjoy nature as a young man, as something to subdue, a place to prove oneself, an environment in which to seek physical challenges, to explore, to adventure. It is one thing to carve ski turns, to climb rock faces, to kayak white water rapids. But it is something else to harvest, to hone, to shape.
Woodworking – who would have thought? Maybe someday, in old age, I’ll even enjoy gardening?