Slowly, and with Care
Dear Eugene,
This morning I thought whoever repainted my kitchen window sill didn't do a good job, for there is a sliver of very thin brush stroke that is of a different shade of white than the uniformity of everything else.
I held out my right index finger, to touch the texture of the sliver, to feel the mistake that it is. The sliver, like a little worm, crawled its way above my fingernail, instantaneously gave it a different shade just as it did to the window sill.
The "thin brush stroke" turned out to be a very faint shred of reflected light cast on the sill, and now my fingernail, its source obscure and doesn't matter to me anyway; for all I needed to know is it was no "mistake" at all.
My painter was a great craftsman, and that paint job was done a few years ago when he rebuilt my kitchen. Since then under many different shades of light I've been looking at the same sill every morning and found no off-color artifact on it.
Yet all it took was one tiny sliver of weakly reflected light from an unknown source for me to lose faith, to stop trusting my painter, my friend, the great craftsman.
I saw this when taking my Sabbath walk yesterday and asked, "Who can trust a building such as this?
"By taking just two steps forward to face it from the proper angle."
This morning I was more than delighted to learn (Canada's own!) Ondaatje's "The English Patient" was named the greatest-ever winner of the Man Booker Prize. One original review of the book from 1992 has this title: "Read slowly, and with care." I'd say the same thing about anything that is worth reading.
I removed my finger from the sill and heard an ambulance siren blaring in a distance. Some dog from an adjacent street howled in response.
Yours, Alex
This morning I thought whoever repainted my kitchen window sill didn't do a good job, for there is a sliver of very thin brush stroke that is of a different shade of white than the uniformity of everything else.
I held out my right index finger, to touch the texture of the sliver, to feel the mistake that it is. The sliver, like a little worm, crawled its way above my fingernail, instantaneously gave it a different shade just as it did to the window sill.
The "thin brush stroke" turned out to be a very faint shred of reflected light cast on the sill, and now my fingernail, its source obscure and doesn't matter to me anyway; for all I needed to know is it was no "mistake" at all.
My painter was a great craftsman, and that paint job was done a few years ago when he rebuilt my kitchen. Since then under many different shades of light I've been looking at the same sill every morning and found no off-color artifact on it.
Yet all it took was one tiny sliver of weakly reflected light from an unknown source for me to lose faith, to stop trusting my painter, my friend, the great craftsman.
I saw this when taking my Sabbath walk yesterday and asked, "Who can trust a building such as this?
"By taking just two steps forward to face it from the proper angle."
This morning I was more than delighted to learn (Canada's own!) Ondaatje's "The English Patient" was named the greatest-ever winner of the Man Booker Prize. One original review of the book from 1992 has this title: "Read slowly, and with care." I'd say the same thing about anything that is worth reading.
I removed my finger from the sill and heard an ambulance siren blaring in a distance. Some dog from an adjacent street howled in response.
Yours, Alex
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