We are in the dark corner of the pub together. We have been here for some time. Out of my coat I produce a pile of old photographs. Something to show you. They are a gift from the past, together we will look, I will tell what comes to mind. Do not be gloomy, simply remember that history happens only once, it never repeats.
But much is born out of simple fact: That which is unique, breaks.
Some years ago a nearby city built a plaza. It is wholly unremarkable: No one lingers there, no one brings food or a book. Children do not play there. If a public space is never used, why did we make it? The question returns an echo: If we are richer today, why are we not routinely surpassing the shared spaces we were able to create one hundred years ago?
What did a person photographing such a park imagine about the beauty of our parks, one hundred years hence? What do we imagine about the beauty of our public spaces one hundred years from today? Maybe the echo is closer: Do we engage in the act of imagining public spaces at all? Somebody had to once, for this park was not an accident.
Love and effort create magnificent places. Genius inhabits them. People go to them because they know such places and landscapes offer consolation of the soul, and the soul is not fooled by substitutes. We let those places turn our moods, we want them to, they do so easily. Today it is not always hard to find such places, but why is it difficult to make new ones?
Was this a great work of public art? Or was it simply proper and fitting for a public fountain? Did they vote on it? Did the public complain about the expense? How did it come to be? What about this one?
The details here are not trivial additions: If we were so poor, after all we had to fetch fresh water by hand, why did we take the expense to build these so beautifully? We must have known something then that we no longer know. What was it? Who made them? Was it a committee? Decree? Did an impulse of the soul build these things? Where did that impulse go?
Something odd happened. I think today we do not know how to go about building a water fountain. What we know is how to build one thousand water fountains. But not how to build one. (I pray you understand that this is not a thought about water fountains.)
Commoditization
Some of the answer lies here, with commoditization.
Commodity: interchangeable goods within their category, such a bar of copper, barrel of oil, or sack of coffee of agreed-upon quality. It does not matter who made the copper bar, only that it is 99.9% pure. The word comes from the Latin commodus: suitability, convenience. Commodities improve trade. Interchangeability improves trade and allows for replaceable parts, standardization, and scale.
These are improvements, but the urge to commoditize alone improves a seen monetary cost at the expense of the unseen. We must not think it comes free of charge.
That which is unique, breaks. When finished objects become commodities they break too, but they are easily replaced. When you break a chair, you buy another chair. We know well how to make one thousand chairs. They sit in boxes, lining the warehouses, ready for two-day shipping.
But when the unique breaks, we might mend.
To learn the skill of mending is to also gain unconsciously the skill of building, to understand the very urge to build. If we never mend, we not only risk building less but building in perverse ways.
To mend is to comprehend a human scale problem, and without this understanding our creations become strange creatures. We see this in the common examples of our time, from architecture to websites: Things used daily that, inexplicably, do not seem to be invented for human use. In the case of housing, bad architecture treats a human-scale environment as if it were a commodity-scale problem. The creators of some places see inhabitants not as humans but parameters. I do not need to spoil your view with visions of this architecture, I only wonder, what have their creators ever repaired?
When the unique is created, it also creates the creator.
The more finished goods become commodities, the fewer opportunities an individual has to generate new creation. The ability to mass-produce removes the opportunity for the great many to learn to produce at all. From such a thought, a future full of consumption-only hobbies might come as no surprise.
If you commoditize toys, you remove the toymaker. If you remove the toymaker, the toy is only an object of consumption. It ceases to be an object of wonder.
The hands that build the ship have knowledge that cannot be fully spoken, only taught by other hands. Each pair of hands must find another pair to learn from, and no pair of hands are the same. The injection-mold and metal die machines can make one thousand toys each minute, but they have no hands, they cannot teach. Will the operators of the machines be able to design the next machine, as the child who watches the toymaker might design the next toy? I worry. I hope you understand.
That which is unique, breaks. It must be cultivated. It is one thing to care for a magnificent garden, but another entirely to plan for a new one.
Something worrisome: The more things become commodities, the more we start to treat places and people like commodities, too. But I am an optimist, I think we are only in the early hours of understanding the techniques we have created. Technology is a wild horse, we have learned to harness it, but not master it. The results run amok: Our new creations trample the beauty of places and things because we have yet to incorporate our love of craft. And so this initial commodification comes to us at the expense of all things divine, and it causes the sacred to leave art, as it leaves things and places too. But we avoid the ugly park and travel to the beautiful park. The divine is still within people, and will not leave.
People and places and things are not as different from each other as we were lead to believe. We exist together in an ecology. Unique places form unique people, who create unique works. These may be fragile, it is up to us to value them or not, but in history they have been our collective pride. I think if we have another renaissance, think for a moment of what the word means, it will be a rediscovery of the beauty of these things. I will speak of this to you again another day.
Remember: History happens only once. There is no reason things must remain or return to any particular state. We are always free to find our own values. But what will it take to value the ecology that fosters the unique, the creations that made some places and things so special that we call them works of art, or travel across the world just to see them?
There is a tale: Two oak trees sit at the edge of the forest. One is sound and hale, taller than all others, with prosperous limbs, the forest’s pride. The other is old and harboring sickness, rotting away inside. When the storm comes, the sickly oak will outlast the whirlwinds, but the sound oak will be destroyed, uprooted by the blast. And why? Because the branches catch the wind.
If we want the forest, we must continue to garden and sow.
Welcome, ghosts
We are still in the quiet corner of the pub. We watch the waiter return and leave in silence. Do you know why we are here, and not elsewhere?
There are in this world certain lonely places: The mountaintop when a storm begins, a long drive under the obscurity of night, the unfinished attic of an old house as a child, the empty alley of an otherwise busy city. In the prolonged absence of others, our senses both sharpen and diffuse. We might begin to hear the subtle sounds that are forgotten in normal life. We might lose track of time. We become almost at risk of noticing things that are not really there. Solitude conspires with our surroundings to push the seen world and the unseen world closer together. It is no wonder that these settings are where we find ghosts.
I tell you my friend: History is such a place. You are always alone exploring it, and it is always trying to look back at you.
Archives
The internet houses the greatest museum that the world has ever made. The humble archivists of every rank—from the employees of major institutions to the smallest town’s historical club—have belabored to digitize their treasure. The world’s vast collections of photographs, paintings, drawings, etchings, and letters sit here, among the internet’s drawers. Almost all are pieces that no earthly museum will ever display: They are too obscure, unattractive, ordinary, and above all simply too numerous for the possibility. Many articles, despite their new home, will only ever be seen by a handful of eyes.
But they are here, our collective inheritance. The shoebox under the earth’s crust, full of all the things we have forgotten.
It is a favorite occupation of mine to drift through this museum. I have seen hundreds of thousands of photographs, etchings, and paintings. I have studied a few. I am looking for the things that are not on any map of history, not in any index. Instead I wish to wonder myself with the sightings too casual to mention in written history. Historical writing often makes the mistake of focusing solely on presence, of what is here and why. But goaded by Zweig, I am looking for traces of absence, the unnamed things that once were, and are silently no longer. I want to see the ghosts.
Of these visual articles I cannot offer a summary of any kind — no slideshow of the most profound or dramatic. I have long since lost their references. But they remain with me, they line the walls of my mind. I offer only fragments.
All learning is remembering. All around us is a great forgetting.
Until very recent times, much of the world was built out of informal spaces. The natural place for a shoemaker’s shop, for instance, is a modest extension of his home. To rent a storefront would be needlessly complex: he would have to find a space, contract with a landlord, pay rent, commute, etc. It may take fewer resources to simply build only what he needs onto his own house, but the important distinction that makes this space informal is not the expense. It is the permission-less nature of creating his own shop, the act of not negotiating with a landlord or any other authority, that makes the practice compelling. In many places to build such a small storefront today, even if it was permitted, would require so-called permits.
A shoemaker may be hard to come by today, but the ghost is the shop: how it was built, how it functioned in life. The shoemaker’s shop—any shop—has become more absent.
Time formalizes. Professionalizes. This brings advantages. But eventually, it conspires to remove the informal.
This is somewhat unfortunate. The work is now out of view. Why does this matter? Because genius is an interaction of people and places.
It is worth remembering from history that the bistro—the small Parisian restaurants serving home-cooked meals in very modest settings—like the cafe before it, was an invention. Many tales exist of its origin. Some say it was working-class landlords opening their kitchens for extra income. Others say it was the Auvergnats, immigrating to Paris from what is today central-south France, who first worked as rag-pickers, then wood and coal sellers, then metalworkers, who created small working-class restaurants to supplement their income. Either way, it was not planned or engineered, but simply not-disallowed. There were no rules in place to stop this invention.
The word bistro has changed meanings since the mid 1900s to mean something quite different, a much trendier place. And why? Partly fashion, but partly because the old model has crept into impossibility.
Perhaps we don’t care, collectively, for this invention. Perhaps inexpensive restaurants are not worth the health risks, the noise, and all the other troubles that lead us to ensure their demise at the hands of fees and approval stamps.
But we do lose a meeting-place. And we again lose the interaction of people. By degrees our space for genius grows smaller. It is no wonder we spend so much time reading little texts on little screens, like this one. It is the last easy place for minds to meet. This is our pub, do you realize?
More important than the restaurant is the people, and not just the patrons.
There are a number of details worth studying in Krøyer’s painting, a favorite of mine. But the subject that enchants me the most are the woman and man behind the bar. They raise to me a thousand questions. Are they the owners? Is this the first floor of someone’s house? Is this a semi-retired couple’s source of income? (How was this place built? Where did the materials come from? How much does it cost to operate? How difficult was it for the owner to open such a place? Could they have done it if they were illiterate? What are all barriers to opening it?)
What are the options for a semi-retired couple today to do something like this? Have we ensured that seniors can still act upon this world, interact with it, in meaningful ways? I pray you understand that this is not a thought about restaurants, but people. The fact is that thousands of new barriers have made this too expensive or complex. Such an osteria no longer exists. The seniors are instead placed in homes. The place is a ghost, and we treat the people as ghosts.
If you create a good product or process, and don’t constrain yourself too tightly, it will have other uses that you will discover later. This is true in almost every field. There are a million examples in business, a compact one is the founding of cosmetics company, Avon: A door-to-door bookseller in the late 1800s used perfume samples to try and interest customers. The samples were more popular than the books, so he switched to selling perfume.
Another is the story of YouTube, which began life as a dating site that failed terribly. No one wanted to upload video introductions of themselves, not even after the founders offered $100 for participants to do so. But the video uploading platform created in 2005 was very good, so they simply let anyone upload anything, and the users, not the website creators, found its real uses. The YouTube we know today was an invention that founders let happen, by way of a permission-free set of users.
These stories are not so different from each-other, or the invention of the bistro. There is a large danger in over-engineering your plan, and failing to respond to local conditions. There is great bounty in remaining sensitive to context. We understand this individually. Do we understand it collectively? Are we as a civilization still letting uses be discovered?
Software is attractive to many, myself included, precisely because of its permission-less nature. But instead of praising software, we should think very hard about the ossification of the physical world. On a grand scale, we have come to decide what can be done and what cannot be done, have decided how difficult to make building things that were once permission-less, and have even decided what the nature of work looks like. Ever-rigid systematizing damages the softest fringes of society the most, the tender growth and the deepest roots. The young are more confined to pre-defined destinies. The old are simply confined. A mounting complexity erodes.
I wonder: What were the tradeoffs we wanted to make? Are they really the ones we have made? Can we see them clearly, these ghosts just out of view?