Almost everything major in this house, exceptions would be the kitchen and mechanicals, was created predominantly by hand.  Granted, most of the time machine power amplified human muscle power,  for example a circular saw replacing a hand saw, but truly automated assembly has a small presence in the house.  This means that the house and its contents are an absolutely immense monument to man’s capacity to work, even leaving aside the staggering time investment of the creative work represented by the book, music and art collections.  We take our ability to do this sort of work for granted, yet how completely it sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom!  To build, to plant, to create and then to exchange those goods for something else, at the root of it creation is our means of survival.  And that has evolved into a remarkable work ethic, I think of the willingness to carve and to paint gargoyles and decoration high on buildings (both religious and secular) which no one, before the era of flight, would ever see, simply because that was how it ought to be.  

This work, of course, is the case with any building, but it is brought closer to the surface when one can find the traces of past work: carpenter’s marks, slight irregularities, or perhaps most impressively when one is faced with repairing something.  I was contemplating this while working on my off again-on again project of repairing the binding of a rug, which requires upwards of ten or more whip stitches per inch, each carefully placed for the correct tension and strength while obscuring as little of the pattern as possible.  Even if you have the hang of it, it simply takes time.  Some of the rugs record previous repairs, in all cases the wear records the pattern of feet, time after time.  And as I repair the rug, I wonder, ‘who was the person who wove it?, what did they think of?, was it just a job that they were thankful to have?, did they enjoy what they had created?, did they wonder about the people who would buy the rug, who lived in a world so very different?’    Maybe they cared little for the rug, maybe they thought it ridiculous (surely some of the carvers of the gargoyles must have grumbled at the architect) but they did it nonetheless, and did it well.  I can’t pretend to grasp what the lives of the people who wove, and still weave, the rugs we lump under ‘Oriental’, but in my repairs, I can, for myself, weave a connection.