My office door isn’t plumb.
That bugs me.
It isn’t far out. You can’t see it. Really, its only noticeable if there is weight on the coat hook on the back of the door. Because then it falls partially-closed.
Not fully-closed mind you.
Not even mostly closed.
Just closed enough to look sloppy.
If my office was in a 100 year old house, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Old wooden structures settle over time. They are never plumb. Or level. (Except after major remodeling jobs – and even then, it’s usually only a matter of time before things settle again.)
But my office is in a giant steel and concrete structure. It’s stable1. (Boring. But stable.) And hanging a door properly is an exceedingly simple task for a competent carpenter. So the fact my door isn’t plumb means the person who hung it just didn’t. Didn’t make it plumb.
To be clear, there is no imminent danger from my door being a little out. It lolls itself closed-ish too lazily to be a danger to anyone’s fingers. Most likely, it is within the building code tolerances for plumb-ness. I think doors can be something like 3/8” out of plumb from the top of the jamb to the bottom, so whoever hung it was not exactly engaged in malpractice. He2 did not do his job well. But he met minimum requirements.
Still…
The door should stay where I put it.
An open door is an invitation. A closed door, a deterrent. My job is inherently a community endeavor, so colleagues (especially students) need to feel welcomed to come in and talk to me. Certainly there are times I need to be left alone, so I can get something done in my office – and I close my door at those times. But it should be me, not my door, that decides when to welcome and when to deter visitors.
In failing to do his job well, the carpenter who hung my door, made it harder for me to do mine. The couple of minutes saved in settling for “plumb-enough” translates to ongoing time spent, by me, to make my door cooperate3.
Buuuuuuuut… if I am honest, that is not the thing that really bugs me. It is annoying, to be sure. But there is an underlying failure, a falseness, that eats at me.
It was Robert Pirsig who introduced me to the concept of Arete. More precisely, he provided a name for a thing I (and, I think, most human beings) do without really thinking about it – and often in secret. I am still trying to get my head around this ancient Greek concept, which does not translate accurately into English. It has been translated as “virtue” or “excellence.” Neither is right. Or wrong. (At least, not in contemporary English usage.) But I think craftspeople understand arete – even if it seems ineffable to contemporary Westerners. Perhaps an illustration can eff it:
I hadn’t used a welder in about 20 years – and I hadn’t been very proficient even back then. So as I began to lay beads on the driveshaft I was trying to repair they looked… um… shitty. They were uneven. There was metal spatter everywhere. And they couldn’t be further from straight – wandering so far away from the joint that most of the ugly piles of weld-bead sat either on the collar or the shaft but did nothing to actually join them together. Even so, after a few passes, there was enough new metal joining the pieces together that I could have installed it on the tractor and it probably would have worked just fine. In reality, it didn’t really matter that it was unbalanced. The front driveshaft does not spin fast enough on that tractor for an imbalance to cause any sort of vibration. It is a small tractor – 24 HP – so the joint wouldn’t need to bear too much torque either. That end of the shaft is hidden well up under the bottom of the tractor, so the only way anyone would see it would be to remove the mower deck, crawl underneath, and look up while laying on the ground, flat on their back. And I was the only person ever likely to be doing that. Furthermore, even with a poor weld, it wasn’t likely to rust-out until most everything else on the tractor had already worn out. In short, I didn’t really have a practical reason not to stick the shitty-looking shaft back in the tractor and be done with it.
The thought of installing it that way didn’t even occur to me.
Whether anyone else would see it could not have been less relevant. The repair wasn’t yet right. And I don’t care whether it matters to anyone else – it matters to me. So I got out my angle-grinder and smoothed out the transition from collar to shaft as best I could – and continued working with it until any excess metal was gone and what was left was gleaming silver. There were lots of voids and uneven spots around the area that needed to be fused, but it was clean now. So I laid another few beads – still ugly, but not as bad as the first try (my hands were beginning to remember how to work with the wirefeed welder). Too much metal, too poorly applied, and still too ugly – so back at it with the grinder. Then more welding. More grinding. And so on… until eventually, I had a smooth transition that gave no indication the one piece had previously been two. After a coat of paint, I installed my new shaft with a sense of peace that comes from knowing a thing has been done right.
The point of this little driveshaft tangent is that I wanted to illustrate what I think is the essence of craft: it is not merely a category of endeavor. It is work done with a particular orientation toward excellence, namely arete. A craftperson strives after excellence, because they are working to a standard that is internal to the task – whether that task is carpentry, cooking, dancing, organizing, leading, mechanicin’, teaching, writing, welding, or nearly any human endeavor. It is not a generalized trait though. None of us can be excellent at all of the things. Each of us has our particular set of endeavors we approach as craft – though it seems we generally do not choose them so much as they choose us. To be a craftsperson is to be indwelt with a burden for ongoing improvement in a particular endeavor.
To be clear arete is very different from perfectionism. Perfectionism is externally driven by shame. It is a compulsive worry over the judgment of other people. In contrast, external judgments are irrelevant to arete. The comparison that craftspeople make is not to other individuals. It is between their current capabilities and the vision they have for what is possible. Between what is and what could be. Paradoxically, while I think this means craftspeople are not satisfied with good enough – they also know when a job is done. In other words, arete is not about eliminating all of the flaws – or drawing out all of the potential. It is fundamentally rooted in realistic, critical awareness of one’s current skills and capabilities; capacity for problem finding; vision for what is not yet, but could be; and an insatiable drive to close that gap. Striving after excellence is not the same as obsessing over flaws.
Or perhaps a mountain-climbing metaphor would be better than a gap-closing metaphor – because a closed gap would be the end of the matter. With trekking through mountains, though, every hill crested opens whole new landscapes that were hidden from view behind the rise. I suppose, if you are not into mountain views, it could be demoralizing to get to what you thought was the top of the hill, only to find that it not only keeps going up, but there are a hundred more hidden behind it. But if mountains are your thing, then every new viewpoint is exhilarating – and renewed motivation to go further.
Each new viewpoint is a pretty great place to be too. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.
So I think arete – and, therefore, craft – is about being able to recognize ‘I have pushed my current abilities to their limit and this is the best I can do to solve this problem, right now, but I also know what I need to improve – and when I do, there will be currently unimaginable new possibilities… and new problems to find and solve.’
I called it a burden. I suppose that sounds like a bad thing. I don’t mean it to be. My experience is that to be burdened by teaching or making or mechanicing is akin to being burdened with eating. If I wish to keep living, I can’t not eat. It is a daily burden. But eating is also an inherently pleasurable experience – at least, it is if it’s done well. It is its own reward. The same is true for craft: I can’t not do it – but doing it well is its own, inherent reward. It is life sustaining for homo faber. And, as such, it is an essence of being human.
Back to my door… A convenient way to dismiss my complaint here is to position me as an old foggie who is pining for a idealized history that never really was. And on the surface, I suppose it looks like I am claiming something like ‘it ustabe that people took pride in their work.’ Moreover, I suppose that, for most people, my complaint about the sloppily lolling door would seem hypocritical once they saw that it opens to an office filled with haphazard-looking piles of books and papers. But I think that mistakes a surface feature for something more essential.
You may have noticed that I glossed over the painting of the shaft above. In fact, when I said I painted the driveshaft before installing it, what I meant was that I grabbed the can of spraypaint from my shelf that was least unmatched to the tractor, shook it, pulled the trigger, and when it spit out chunks and bubbles, I partially wiped them off and found a different can that sprayed more evenly, which I used to quickly coat the bare metal. There were some runs in the paint. The two colors of spraypaint weren’t matched to each other, much less the tractor. And I installed it still wet, so there are fingerprints in the finish. Why was I so meticulous with the weldy part, but so cavalier with the painty part? Painting was merely (literally in this case) a surface feature. It was not [centrally] related to the standards internal to the task I was completing. If it had been in a place it was visible, I would have cared about aesthetic appearance too, because I like my stuff to look nice. But I am not burdened with a need for flawless appearance. All my effort in welding the shaft was about making sure the repair was done right. Not just good enough. Right. That is my craft. The reason I cared about how the weld looked was because that is an indicator of the quality of the repair. For a part that is not visible, color and finish are irrelevant. Only the mechanical properties matter to the mechanicing I was doing. And that shaft is now more robust than it was when it was new. The role played by the paint is that it protects the repair from being weakened by rust. The paint’s job is to protect the repair. Color and finish are irrelevant to accomplishing that task.
What bugs me about the door is not that it was hung poorly. It is that it was hung sloppily by a professional. It was undisciplined work.
The discipline of hanging doors is, to a carpenter, what the discipline of an open C-chord is to a guitarist. It is not easy for a beginner – and it is bound to hurt your fingers the first few times. Getting your hand to contort to place your fingers on the correct strings, in the correct frets is tedious at first – until your muscles learn to reproduce the shape reliably. Three different fingers have to hold three different strings firmly to the fretboard in three different frets. Two more strings ring as well, but without being contacted, even a little bit, by fingers. So the fingers holding down the other strings have to be placed precisely on those strings, and held nearly perpendicular to the fretboard, so they don’t touch the other vibrating string, millimeters away. If there is any contact at all, the vibrating string slapping against the skin causes an unpleasant buzzing sound. So it is only the fingertips, the most sensitive part of the human hand, that press down in the strings. And they have to press down with a LOT of force, on a very small surface area on the string. Without enough force, the vibration of the string can make it bounce on the fretwire – and that makes an unpleasant buzz. Holding the string down with enough force to ensure the fretwire creates a node hurts. A lot. Until you have developed callouses. In addition, one other string needs to not ring – which can be ensured if it is muffled by one of the fingers fretting a note on an adjacent string. That is, while the tip of the ring finger holds down the 5th string to the fretboard, in the 3rd fret, the side of the same finger rests against the 6th string, damping any vibrations in that string. While all of this is going on, the thumb is curled around the back of the neck, supplying the force to pull the other three fingers down onto the fretboard. But it has to arc around the side of the neck. If it gets too close to the vibrating 1st string the fleshy part of the palm will touch the string and cause an unpleasant buzz (or mute the string altogether). Oh, and then there’s the pinkie, which is busy trying to stay out of the way of all the vibrating strings. That is a lot of different things (5 fingers pushing in 7 different directions) for a person’s non-dominant hand to do simultaneously – while also trying not to recoil in pain. Discipline, though, is what makes it second nature. Disciplined practice.
I’ve been playing guitar for 30 years, so, to write that previous paragraph I had to keep holding my left hand up in the C-chord shape to see what it was doing in order write about it. I literally had to stop and look at my hand in order to remember what my fingers do when I play the first chord I ever learned. Because I don’t think about it anymore. I just play a ‘C.’ My hands know what to do. Because disciplined practice has made it second nature. And it has to be. All of the chords have to be second nature or I wouldn’t be able to play a song. At some point, I am going to have to switch to a different chord – in time with the rhythm. And if I am reading a chord chart, I can’t stop to look at my left hand. It just needs to know where to be. And it doesn’t take long to develop the coordination and proprioception to play dozens of different chords without even looking at where your fingers are.
After a beginning guitarist painstakingly forces their fingers into the contortions of a couple different chords for the first time, they all have the same reaction to seeing a more practiced guitarist play music: “holy shit, how did you change chords so fast – WITHOUT EVEN LOOKING?!?” It doesn’t matter how many times they had seen someone play guitar previously, no one notices that practiced guitarists don’t watch their fretting hand until they have tried to produce chords themselves. And suddenly it seems superhuman. If an infant learning to walk had the perspective to compare their own clumsy toddling to the older children and adults effortlessly walking and running around them, surely they would have the same thought. How do you stay upright so long without falling over – without even concentrating on balancing?
People master these things all the time. There is nothing special about a human being who can walk. There is nothing special about a guitarist who can make a C-to-G chord change without looking. And there is nothing special about a carpenter hanging a door. These are among the millions of complex things human beings learn to do so commonly they are mundane. They are only challenging to do at first, but become second-nature with enough disciplined practice.
If I were going to hang a door, it would be an afternoon job – for all of the same reasons it took me an order of magnitude longer to repair that driveshaft than it would have taken a skilled welder. I would have to think through all of the steps. I would inevitably get some out of sequence and end up redoing them – some of them multiple times. I would have to think through where to put shims and which screws to tighten – inevitably making wrong decisions along the way and having to undo some of them. It would be just as clumsy as my first few C-chords. I can hang a door properly – eventually. But it would be a slow, mistake-riddled process. I simply have not undertaken the kind of disciplined practice that enables a craftsperson engaged in that kind of carpentry to hang a door in just a few minutes – with the kind of automaticity that would make a novice onlooker exclaim “holy shit, how did you …?”
I suppose that is what offends me about the sloppy door. It’s not that I think hanging a door is objectively easy. It’s that a professional carpenter who hangs a door poorly is akin to a undisciplined guitarist whose fingers aren’t in the right spots and all the buzzing obscures the music they are playing — or an undisciplined mechanic whose slapdash repairs get things working for a while, but never last. Someone who is not a musician may not be able to identify what is wrong – only that something isn’t right with the song they are hearing. Someone who isn’t mechanically inclined might not see the temporary-ness of the silicon and duct tape – only that the vehicle seems to be a lemon. And someone who doesn’t know about hanging doors may not see the difference between plumb and plumb-ish – only that the space seems a bit janky. But for anyone who has done the work to become competent at even the most ordinary of complex tasks, it becomes impossible not to hear the unpleasant buzzes, to see the impending break-downs, and to wrestle the lolling plumbishness of undisciplined work.
Notes:
- To be fair, the building sits on the silty remains of the Lake Agassiz basin, so “stable” might be a bit of an overstatement. But it is only 3 stories tall and no one has been digging giant holes adjacent to its footings or liquefying clays with incessant vibrations.
- I am assuming gender here, but given what I have seen of the demographic makeup of facilities staff where I work, I think it’s a reasonable assumption.
- Okay, so it is entertaining to me that I now get to use my Serway physics textbook as a doorstop. This also looks sloppy – and eventually I will tire of telling people who notice it that that is what my undergraduate minor in physics is doing for me now. But at this point, I do still think the nerdy, momentum-related irony is funny.