Why I spend 100 hours on a table…
When I was a small child I was sure I would leave such a mark on the human race I would be remembered forever. Forever. Forever and ever.
Nothing lasts forever. Ozymandius and the Colossus of Rhodes and dinosaurs and my favorite pair of shoes and everyone I know and love turns to dust. Nothing I make will last forever, even plastics and styrofoam will only last for tens of thousands of years, and for god’s sake what could I make from those materials anyone would want around that long?
The way I conceptualize time has shifted since I was small. Like the zoom has been increased. The thirty years I have been alive seems like forever to me, I live in a house built in 1859 and that feels ancient, I slept in a building in Italy built in the 13th century and it was a struggle to think of that many minutes and hours. I can’t let the age of the earth into even the periphery of my brain or it will shut down. In the same way I can only focus on the people close around me whose lives I can truly impact or risk being overwhelmed by the responsibilities of being a human being, I can no longer worry or hope for forever. A few hundred years is as broad a scope as I can dream about.
There are pieces of furniture that were made in China in the fourteenth and fifteenth century that have seen daily use and are still strong and beautiful. They haven’t sat in a museum, they aren’t the antique chair you can’t sit in for fear of damaging it, they have been a part of peoples lives, generations of people’s lives, day-in and day-out, for 500, 600 years and are still there. And these pieces have survived, not because of intricate carvings or exquisite shapes (though some have one of these or both), but because they work. A table holds things up. A bench holds people up. If they didn’t they would be gone.
I want to make furniture that does its job for hundreds of years. What makes furniture last is structure, a sensible construction that holds itself together even without relying on glue, screws or nails or bolts. The joinery of Chinese craftsmen has shown itself to be a strong model, and I am working very hard to master what they did, but my furniture is not meant to recreate what has already been done, but to incorporate what works into what I can discover for myself.
To make furniture that has any hope of lasting it has to be made carefully, and to make these intricate, knot-like joints is not for the easily dismayed or discouraged. Currently I am making two tables from teak I saved from the landfill, and just the joints that connect the legs to the apron, just eight points that connect sixteen pieces of wood, has taken me 20 hours and 20 minutes. Maybe by the time I am sixty I will be able to cut and chisel the same joints in ten hours, but I think never in four. But I am happy doing it, I know the table will last longer than I will be alive, barring fire, flood or armageddon. If I can affect people in my life and the lives of the next four, five or six generations, even if it is anonymously, that would be more than enough to satisfy me. I don’t need forever anymore.
