Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
In my spare time, I enjoy photography and have used many cameras over the years. A while ago, the one I hold most dear to me had a terrible accident. I got out of my car after returning home without closing the top of my bag completely. As I stood there, the camera—a magnificent and insanely expensive combination of electronics, glass, and brass that I have worked with for years—slid out of my pocket and fell to the pavement behind me. I heard a thud as it landed.
The camera had certainly been damaged—it had some scratches and minor dents. However, when I examined it, I discovered that it had broken down in an unusual way. The screen and the buttons on the back for viewing photos and adjusting some settings had stopped working. But everything else—all the essential functions—was fine. The camera still took pictures and saved them correctly; its dials still allowed me to control aperture, shutter speed, and exposure. It worked much like the film cameras I had occasionally used years ago. I was amazed that, as I continued to use it, I actually preferred it in this state. Without its more complex digital features to work, it was less distracting, less complicated, more fun, more enjoyable. I decided not to send it in for repair, and have been enjoying it in its fortunately damaged state ever since.
Things break, inevitably—the sooner you accept it, the better. But things break in different ways, and breakage can mean a lot of things. I genuinely like my broken camera—I even take a special pride in using it—while I’m worried about the broken handle on our patio door, which falls off when pulled, and which I’ve been trying to fix for ages without success. (My current suspicions center on one particular, hard-to-find, possibly proprietary screw.) I’m also frustrated by the halogen light in our kitchen—the center of three—that keeps going out, even after replacing the bulb. ChatGPT tells me the problem may be a “transformer fault” caused by the high temperatures of halogen bulbs. It's a common problem, he says, but an electrician will probably find it “impractical” to fix, and so we'll have to put up with a useless bulb until all three are replaced.
These broken objects and others like them give me a general feeling of weariness, overwhelm, and middle age. And yet our abandoned garden shed in the backyard, covered in ivy and slowly crumbling, evokes an almost melancholy awareness of the passage of time, as if it were a nineteenth-century frenzy. And the broken toy airplane attached to the handlebars of my son’s bike—with its tiny red propeller spinning in the wind as he rides—actually evokes anticipation, because I know it can be easily fixed, and that fixing it will make him happy. Some people like to buy old, worn furniture and repaint it; they see in these particular broken objects opportunities to express hope, patience, skill, and imagination. Other kinds of brokenness can show us our fallibility, mortality, energy, adaptability, or potential. A broken thing is a cracked mirror in which you can see many reflections.
There are philosophies of brokenness, which makes sense, given how many broken things disrupt the flow of our lives. How should we perceive these disruptions? A practitioner of the Japanese ethic of wabi-sabi values the beauty of brokenness: rather than trying to fix the wear and tear that inevitably accumulates over time, he or she finds ways to acknowledge and celebrate it. In a classic example of the philosophy, a cup that has been dropped and broken is reassembled through the art of kintsugi, in which lacquer mixed with gold or other metal powder is used to fill cracks; the now cracked, gilded cup tells a story of resilience, authenticity, acceptance, and care amid impermanence. Your favorite jacket, with a mended hole in the lining and the mark of an exploding pen under the pocket, has a bit of wabi-sabi. So does your grandfather’s watch, still working but with a scratch on the glass. I like to imagine that the salon Wabi Sabi, located in a town near mine, helps its clients age gracefully. (I’ve never been there.)
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, exploring how we perceive ourselves and the world, argued that there are two ways in which we can relate to objects. A doorknob, he argued, can be “there”—something we instinctively use without thinking for a second. But that same doorknob, if it breaks, can become “out of reach”: precisely because it doesn’t function, we notice it, examine it, try to figure out what’s wrong with it so that we can fix it. Broken things are often “there” for us in a way that working things are not. What’s true of doorknobs is also often true
Sourse: newyorker.com
