Permanence - a wonderful read

[Derek Cohen]

Below is a link to Covington & Son, the blog of Stan Covington, a degenerate American friend of mine who lives in Japan and who used to post on this forum. He has forgotten more about Japanese tools that more acquire in a lifetime. The story linked to is a gem ...

https://covingtonandsons.com/2024/01/27/permanence/

Regards from Perth

Derek

[John C Cox]

You know, I've thought about this some.... How some things are decidedly less permanent than we would like, while others seem to last for an eternity.

There is probably some irony in the fact that the packaging could well outlast the thing in it.

Furniture is a good example. College towns are famous haunts for antique dealers, because mom and dad's "Cast off's" end up going to college with Little Precious, where they are later painted with some sort of ugly house paint and then jettisoned. With any luck, they end up in the hands of a refinisher, who strips off layer after layer of acrylic and latex paint to reveal two-hundred year old burl walnut and curly maple. Perhaps Ikea isn't such a travesty, as I don't feel bad about my kids brush-painting photo-laminate particle board or returning it to the formaldehyde-scented depths of hades from whence it came.

Kitchen knives are another example. How many times do you see an elderly couple who still has kitchen knives from the beginning of their marriage. Cheap or good, fifty-years later, regular sharpening has barely worn them at all. The handles are likely to fail long before any significant amount of steel is gone. Rather than making new handles out of some wood, they are simply thrown out. The best we can hope for is that their children donate them to a thrift store instead of binning the whole lot.

I suppose wood working hand tools are much the same. Probably most of us here own some tools made long before our grandfathers took their first breath. That's not to say they were good tools, just that with due care, they last a lot longer than people imagine.

Hopefully, you can find someone who values it. Often, that doesn't happen, and impermanence is enforced whether or not something deserves it.

But, such is life.

[Haitham Jaber]

thank you for the reading!

[Edward Weber]

Below is a link to Covington & Son, the blog of Stan Covington, a degenerate American friend of mine who lives in Japan and who used to post on this forum. He has forgotten more about Japanese tools that more acquire in a lifetime. The story linked to is a gem ...

https://covingtonandsons.com/2024/01/27/permanence/

Regards from Perth

Derek

I do subscribe to his blog, a great source of knowledge

[Kemil Pepin]

A nice read, thanks for posting.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I enjoyed the article. Impermanence has been the theme for some of my reading lately. This is a refreshing counterpoint.

[Frederick Skelly]

Enjoyed the article. I thought he did a good job conveying why the material was worthy of respect. That’s always been a pseudo-mystical thing that I’ve never understood when broached by other authors. He really got the idea across to me. (Personally, I’m reluctant to refer to wood as “sacred”. But that’s just me.)

Thanks for posting it.
Fred

[Christopher Charles]

An excellent and thoughtful article indeed, thanks for posting. I've always connected to the idea of woodworking as time-travel, where we hold, shape, excavate and reveal the past when working wood while making objects for the future.

I've also been pondering whether woodworking is an act of entropy. Or not. A similar way of thinking about the central theme of his article, I suppose.

Best,
Chris