Nobody Asked Him To

He does woodwork, and has done it for seven or eight years. A small workbench on the balcony, a set of planes and chisels, weekend mornings. It began with a little stool for the house; later bookshelves, a coffee table, once a chair. It has nothing to do with reports. Nobody asked him to do it, and when it comes out well, it does not count toward his year-end review.

The first four essays were about how he draws lines, walks out of others’ rules, tells whether a line is his, and what happens when the line is clear and he doesn’t walk it. Mostly they were about holding ground: not being decided for from outside, not calling undone things done. A law that is only ever holding ground is only ever defence. This essay is the other side: how a person’s own value unfolds in time.

One word needs fixing first. Developing here means how something a person has owned moves over time: new things of his own surfacing in the same matter; the same care taking a new concrete shape; the centre of his doing drifting elsewhere for a while; perhaps a care he never had before. There is another sense — visible abilities, works, results — and it runs on a different axis. The next section says why the two must not be mixed.

A Shame Not to Sell It

Last year he made a chair, photographed it, put it online, and many people liked it. A friend said: With hands like that, it’s a shame not to sell. When his manager heard, he said: Good — it trains your patience, it’ll help your work.

Both meant well, and neither was empty: the chair really would sell, and woodwork really did train his patience. But both moved the thing into another ledger — one asked what it could be exchanged for, the other what it was useful for elsewhere.

Developing one’s own value is not proving oneself useful. He does not need to prove the chair would sell, or that it made him a better employee, before it counts. Nor is it shaping oneself into a better tool for some future contribution — he doesn’t do woodwork to have a trade in retirement, or to be more useful to anyone. Those things can happen along the way; none of them is the reason. The reason is in him: he, too, is an end. To whittle the present self, bit by bit, into the shape some future use requires is to treat oneself as a means.

Value theory draws the line precisely. What a person produced, learned, left behind — and whose ends are occupying that position — are two axes; neither yields the other. A person can produce a great deal, excellently, inside a scheme of assessment that is not his at all; a person can go a long time producing nothing in the one thing he really owns. There’s output, so it isn’t colonisation is the step that looks most like common sense, and it is the first one value theory refutes: it uses something visible to stand in for something invisible. And one further step: not colonised is not yet the same as his own.

Outside recognition is not useless. Among the likes was an old carpenter who wrote that the tenon on the chair was cut too tight and would crack in damp weather. He noted it and changed how he cut. That is material and inspiration. What recognition cannot do is become the only ruler. The only-ruler comes in several shapes — output (how many pieces a year), rank (placing at a craft fair), reputation (followers) — and one less obvious: a fixed image. He became the chair guy; friends came round to see chairs, and slowly he made only chairs. All can be known and cared about. Make one of them the only ruler, and development gets swapped for that thing’s growth.

Nor is what he has done a final draft. The chair everyone praised is not a peak he must now only repeat. There is no end-point called most beautiful, and at no time is there a finished self to produce. What he has done is a stretch he walked, not a mould for what comes after.

Deepening, Revising, Resting, Shifting

The first time he pushed a plane, the wood curled off in thin shavings and the grain came up layer by layer beneath. He stood there looking for a long time. It did not feel like remembering something; it felt like seeing it for the first time. Later he owned it — not on a particular day he announced; for a while he went to the balcony whenever he had time, and when people asked he said it was his own thing, and was steady inside when he said it.

Once owned, it keeps moving, and not in one way. It can deepen: from nailing stools to joinery without a single nail — new things of his own surfacing in the same matter. It can be revised: at first he wanted large pieces of furniture that could be handed down, made to a master’s standard; later he changed, and made small things for people he knew — a pen holder, a chopping board. The owned thing did not break off; its concrete content changed.

It can rest. The year of the fourth essay he was ill and did not touch his tools for months. That was not losing it. An owned thing does not lose its standing for going long unused; when it fades, it can simply be that it isn’t being done just now, the position still open. It can shift. For several months his weekends went to taking an elderly parent to the hospital, and the centre of his doing was not woodwork. The question readers most want to ask — am I going backwards? — has a false presupposition: a shifted centre is not a loss, and a centre is not a ranking of value. Having no stable centre is not a defect.

So development is not staying with the same concrete pursuit forever. Nor is it the busier the fuller. One year he was getting a lot of attention online; he was making four pieces a month, rushing to photograph them, working faster and faster, and it looked less and less like what he wanted to make. Making more, being more tired, being seen more — those are all on the output axis. They say nothing about whether his own thing is unfolding more fully.

Where It Unfolds

His is a craft. Other people’s can be elsewhere. His sister has read history for years, not to write anything, just to understand how certain things came to happen. A neighbour downstairs sets up a telescope on the roof every clear night and writes down what he sees. An old classmate writes novels — two in twenty years. His mother cared most, all her life, about the people around her: who was ill, whose child was starting school, she remembered all of it. Science, craft, creation, understanding and relationships can all be where a person’s value unfolds.

This is not career advice, and it is not a league table. Unfolding in a craft is not lower than unfolding in understanding; looking after the people around you is not higher than writing novels. Each kind is complete in itself. Which line an action draws from has nothing to do with a person’s standing in value.

And the section blocks one thing. After the year of the fourth essay, he went through a stretch of feeling that planing wood on the balcony at weekends was selfish: others were volunteering, helping people, and he was making a pen holder. He wanted to give every weekend to something meaningful. Helping can be his, if he has really owned something there. But if it is only because he feels that only helping counts, he is narrowing his life into a moral offering. The people in this series treat others as ends and treat themselves as ends. Keep only the first half and the second is cancelled.

The Young Man Downstairs

A young man who had just started work moved in downstairs. One day he saw him working on the balcony and asked if he could come and learn. He said yes. For this young man, cultivating him means letting him choose what to make and make it the way he wants — not making him a second copy of himself.

Sometimes the two help each other. Explaining to the young man why a joint holds, he discovered he had only known how, not really why; explaining it, he worked it out. Once the young man wanted to make a chair that folds — something he had never thought of — and later he made one himself. Sometimes the two pull against each other. A weekend is only two days. The young man wanted to come every Saturday; the table he was making for his mother sat untouched for half a year. On some Saturdays, he said no.

Several things here cannot be settled in advance. His own thing does not need to prove itself useful to the young man before it counts; it was not there in order to teach. Cultivating the young man is not paid for by cancelling his own thing; he need not leave the table forever for the sake of teaching. The two may support each other, or may pull against each other in a limited life. One cannot declare in advance that they will always conflict, nor promise that they will always both be served. How a given Saturday goes is that Saturday’s judgment. On the Saturdays he said no, not giving this time does not by itself show the direction of cultivation was cancelled — and the judgment can be questioned.

And one reversed reading must be headed off, as if development were a new command: everyone must keep going forward; to rest is to stagnate. No. A person may stand before a bridge to some new care and not cross it, and lose nothing in value; he can live on in the cares he has and be entirely consistent. Rest is not stagnation. Development is not a new cannot-not. What cannot be cancelled lies at the level of how people are regarded — including that he, too, is an end. In what he unfolds, how fast, when he rests, when he changes, is his judgment: open either way.

This year he is working on that table for his mother again. He is working on it very slowly.