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 »

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

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 »