Everyday Mastery, Timeless Mastery: Two Notable Books

by Mark R. DeLong

Is successfully learning to drive a car an achievement of “mastery”? Is being able to pee in a public restroom also evidence of a certain form of “mastery”? I ask because in recent weeks, I’ve read two books that explore mastery—how you get to a level of achievement, what mastery “looks like,” and such. I bought the books because their subtitles—”On the Mystery of Mastery” and “The Making of a Craftsman”—suggested some sort of harmonious overlap, even though the subtitles shared no word to tie them much more than thematically. After all, we know more or less what mastery is, don’t we, and isn’t it near the center of craftsmanship?

Together, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery (Liveright, 2023) by Adam Gopnik and Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman (in USA & Canada: Ecco, 2024; in UK: Doubleday, 2024) by Callum Robinson present variants of mastery—both useful, though often profoundly opposed to each other in revealing ways. Reading them one after another (or nearly so) gave me a chance to compare them, and to see the differences that Gopnik and Robinson draw in their view of mastery.

Metaphorically, the differences come to this: Gopnik is satisfied to pull a knife safely from a drawer and slice bread or some vegetables with ease. Robinson sees the knife as an extension of his hand as he carves; his knife is a mode of expression. It is the difference of the happily common mastering of everyday tasks and a transformative and exceptional mastery. (Both, in their ways, “mysterious,” I should add.)

Everyday mastery

The cover of Adam Gopnik's The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery (Liveright, 2023)

Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work explores seven “mysteries of mastery” mainly through the stories of Gopnik’s (mis)adventures when he puts himself under the tutelage of a master—a driving instructor, master of urban driving and an ambiguous hand wave;[1] an artist acquaintance with classical tastes of “new realism”; Gopnik’s mother, an irrepressible and talented baker; a social worker who specializes in paruresis (an inability to urinate in public places); magicians, both long-gone and contemporary; a dance instructor; a boxing coach. These are quite unexceptional performances, of course, with the exception of the social worker. (Gopnik tells his story of mastering peeing in public restrooms in a chapter simply called “Relieving,” which surely seems appropriate.)

Gopnik’s definition of mastery seems to circle matters of control or, more simply, being able to navigate in a world more or less successfully, accepting and facing risk and avoiding catastrophe in daily life. It is an attitude that turns the everyday into something more heroic, and in the process elevating the status of all who survive the wiles of the world. Mastery is common enough. Read more »

Sunday, December 8, 2024

“Their Wives Wind Them Up While Asleep”

by Mark R. DeLong

A line of about half-dozen men, bundled up against cold, affix bolts and assemble magnetos for Ford's Model T. The image shows the first assembly line created for Ford's car assembly line in 1913.
Workers on the First Moving Assembly Line Put Together Magnetos and Flywheels for 1913 Ford Autos, Highland Park, Michigan. 1913. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1633486. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_assembly_line_-_1913.jpg.
Rights: Public domain

Restoration of my old car took well more than a decade before it again powered itself along US Highway 501. With time and experience, differences between a craftsman and me would continue to diminish, as my inexperienced hands layered their actions into bodily remembered history and embodied knowledge. My hands remained bumbling and hesitant, though in time a little less than when I began. A craftsman’s hands would be effective and confident, mastering both tools and materials. The craftsman’s eyes, hands, and mind work in concert—far better tuned than mine. But despite the gulf of experience between craftsmanship and my labor, the years hunched over the car opened or, better, finely textured my understanding of how work helps to fulfill human life. That seemingly basic understanding was, paradoxically, obscured by the automobile itself.

A common element that the craftsman and I shared throughout the process amounted to the perspective of the whole project. Even when the car’s parts were contained in Ziplock bags, its chassis stripped to bare metal (much rusted through, too), my mind saw the product that my work, bumbling or not, could bring forth. Mine was an unjustifiably sturdy and very hopeful vision; the same would go for the craftsman, though he had skills to justify the hope. That hopeful perspective, justified and not, formed the strongest bond tying the craftsman and me.

A stripped down chassis of a 1963 Jaguar E-type with badly worn light brown "sand" paint. The chassis has no engine and is stripped bare. It stands on jackstands.
Barely a bolt remains on the car chassis a week after it was pushed into the garage. The rest of the car’s parts were stored in Ziplock bags or boxes. Putting it all back together took about fifteen years, and a lot of learning. Digital photograph by Mark DeLong, September 20, 2002.

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris used hope to draw the distinction between “useful work and useless toil.” “What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?” Morris asked in Signs of Change (1888). “It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality.” Morris along with William Blake and John Ruskin nostalgically revered craft, and Morris particularly romanticized it. Yet, if nostalgia and idealism colored his vision of work somewhat, Morris understood the special qualities of craft work: its connectedness to meaning, its close tie to qualities of uniqueness, beauty, and durability—its reverence for things and the making of them.

Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” loomed in the factories of the time. The three men yearned for the good old days of craftsmanship as a reaction to the indifferent brutality of the Industrial Revolution, though what they desired—a pleasantly medieval fantasy, really—may never have supplied the needs of their own time. Read more »

Palpable Knowledge Of Things: A Meditation

by Mark R. DeLong

Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. (Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge)

Eugene Russell, a piano tuner interviewed by Studs Terkel in Working, said with satisfaction that the computer wouldn’t be replacing him anytime soon, even though he mentioned electronic devices—“an assist,” he said, that helps tuners. Eugene’s wife Natalie felt otherwise, saying at one point in their conversation, “It’s an electronic thing now. Anyone in the world can tune a piano with it. You can actually have a tin ear like a night club boss.”

Eugene mixed elements of beauty and delight with the technical complexity of piano tuning, recalling how he would “hear great big fat augmented chords that you don’t hear in music today” and that he would come home and say, “I just heard a diminished chord today!” Once he was tuning a piano in a hotel ballroom during “a symposium of computer manufacturers. One of these men came up and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Someday we’re going to get your job.’ I laughed. By the time you isolate an infinite number of harmonics, you’re going to use up a couple billion dollars worth of equipment to get down to the basic fundamental that I work with my ear.”

The piano tuner feels and practices the tune, which is hardly reducible to formulae, perhaps because it is one of those things in life that’s approximated, but not unambiguously achieved. At best, tuning a piano is a compromise: “The nature of equal temperament makes it impossible to really put a piano in tune,” Eugene explained. “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.” Read more »