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Kindle Notes & Highlights
I could now be trusted to drive a nail without supervision, which was better than any compliment.
As long as the working status of my hands remains intact, please let me remain a pupil.
Always maintain the attitude of a student.
“The teacher and the student walk the same path,”
The key to safety is knowing your tools and your own skill level, adding in the proper equipment, and then throwing in a little natural caution/distrust.)
So I will now share with you, in this somewhat educational text, that no matter how much we love our time at work (those of us lucky enough to love what we do), we can still find it detrimental if we do it too much. For optimum health, leisure must be held in a regard commensurate with labor.
In hindsight, it’s easy to examine the arc of a person’s life or career with a discerning eye, but when we are actually living through that life-span, its destination is not so clear. Luminaries and legends as well as abject failures are often just trying to make their rent or get kissed (or both).
“I not only value the Shakers’ considerable craftsmanship but also respect their insistence upon utility as the first tenet of good design. With the Shakers, there is no ego involved, no conscious effort to produce works of art. Austere utility is beautiful in and of itself, and often works of art are inadvertently produced.”
It is the defects in wood and in people that give them depth and make them interesting. They both take thought and patience to work with, but the rewards outweigh the effort.
I became less astonished by this wizardry once I saw Krenov’s written introduction to new students, which included this: “We hope that in viewing what we are offering here, you will pay attention to the details, notice the results, and come to realize that if one cares enough, if one pays enough attention to the richness of wood, to the tools, to the marvel of one’s own hands and eye, all these things come together so that a person’s work becomes that person; that person’s message.”
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.’
