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In my spare time, I’m an obsessed photographer, and through the years I’ve used dozens of cameras. A while ago, a horrible misfortune befell the one that I treasure most. Arriving home, I climbed out of the car without properly closing the top of my bag. As I stood, the camera—a beautiful and ludicrously expensive concatenation of electronics, glass, and brass, which I’ve used daily for years—flew out of its opening, falling to the asphalt behind me. I heard it land with a thud.
The camera was damaged, of course—scratched and a little dented. But, as I tested it, I discovered that it had broken in a surprising way. The screen and buttons on the back, with which one reviews pictures and adjusts certain settings, no longer functioned. But everything else—everything fundamental—was fine. The camera continued to take pictures and save them properly; its dials still allowed me to control aperture, shutter speed, and exposure. It worked a lot like the film cameras I’d used off and on for many years. And I was startled to find, as I continued to use it, that I preferred it this way. With its more advanced digital features inoperative, it was less distracting, less complicated, more engaging, more fun. I decided not to send it in for repair, and have enjoyed it in its felicitously damaged state ever since.
The breaking of things is inevitable—the sooner one gets used to that, the better. But things break in different ways, and brokenness can have a variety of meanings. I genuinely like my broken camera—I even take a peculiar pride in using it—but I’m tortured by the busted handle on our patio door, which pops off when you pull on it, and which I’ve been trying and failing to fix for what seems like forever. (My current suspicions center on a particular, hard-to-find, and perhaps proprietary screw.) I’m similarly provoked by a halogen light in our kitchen—the center pendant of three—which keeps going dark even after its bulb has been replaced. ChatGPT informs me that the issue may be a “transformer failure” caused by the high temperatures of halogen bulbs. It’s a common problem, it says, but one that an electrician will probably conclude is “impractical” to fix, and so we’ll have to live with the useless pendant until all three can be replaced.
These broken objects, and others like them, feed into my general sense of being harried, overburdened, and middle-aged. And yet our unused garden shed out back, which is covered in ivy and slowly tumbling down, conjures an almost wistful consciousness of the passage of time, as though it were a folly on a nineteenth-century estate. And the broken toy airplane attached to the handlebars of my son’s bike—it has a tiny red propeller that turns in the wind as he travels—is actually a source of anticipation, because I know that it will be easy to fix, and that fixing it will make him happy. Some people like to buy old, beat-up furniture and refinish it; they see in those particular broken things opportunities for the expression of hope, patience, competence, imagination. Other kinds of brokenness can show us our fallibility, mortality, energy, adaptability, or capability. A broken thing is a cracked mirror, in which you can assemble a range of reflections.
There are philosophies of brokenness, which makes sense, given how much broken stuff disrupts the flow of our lives. How should we think about those disruptions? A practitioner of the Japanese ethic of wabi-sabi respects the beauty of brokenness: instead of trying to erase the wear and tear that accrues inevitably with time, she finds ways of acknowledging and celebrating it. In a prototypical example of the philosophy, a teacup that has fallen and shattered is reassembled through the art of kintsugi, in which lacquer, mixed with powdered gold or other metals, is used to fill the cracks; now the fractured, gilded cup tells a story of endurance, authenticity, acceptance, and care amid impermanence. Your favorite jacket, with a mended tear in its lining and the mark of an exploded pen below its pocket, has some wabi-sabi. So does your grandfather’s watch, still functional but with a scratch in its crystal. I like to imagine that the Wabi Sabi Salon, in a town near mine, helps its clients age gracefully. (I’ve never visited.)
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote about how we experience ourselves and the world, argued that there were two ways we could relate to objects. A doorknob, he thought, could be “ready-to-hand”—something we reach for and use reflexively, unconsciously, without a moment’s thought. But that same doorknob, if it breaks, can become “present-at-hand”: precisely because it’s not working, we notice it, examine it, try to figure it out so we can fix it. Broken things are often “there” for us in ways that working things aren’t. What’s true for doorknobs is also often true for social norms, relationships, scientific theories, or institutions. When something works, you live in ignorance of it; when it breaks, you develop a belated expertise. In a sense, it’s when things break that we discover them.
Many years ago, at an academic conference, I listened to a talk in which a professor of literature observed that the protagonists in novels are often people for whom society is somehow broken. Most of the people in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” for example, just assume that the point of a young woman’s life is to attract a man and get married; only Lizzy, the heroine, finds herself unwilling to pass through the doorway of marriage. She refuses a proposal she finds unsuitable, and then starts to wonder what the point of marriage is anyway. Then her hesitation inspires a general reconsideration of everything, and she begins asking if any of her society’s norms make sense. “The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it,” she tells her sister Jane. “Every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
In just this way, our attention can shift from a particular broken thing to the broader context behind its brokenness. If you find that your smartphone suddenly feels outdated, you might start reading about the idea of planned obsolescence, or questioning your own consumerism. If you notice that a once inviting local park is now litter-strewn and dingy, you might change your vote for mayor. If something is broken, then maybe someone broke it. Who? But brokenness can also push our attention inward: Lizzy concludes that society is flawed, but also that she has to change. She once saw herself as a good judge of people, but when she realizes how badly she’s misunderstood the man she wants to marry, her judgment—which used to be ready-to-hand—is shown to be flawed, and becomes “there” for her to inspect. “Till this moment I never knew myself,” she thinks.
Is the acceptance of broken things a kind of self-acceptance? According to my wife’s family lore, Uncle Bill, who grew up during the Depression, owned two television sets, one with no picture and one with no sound; he watched TV with them stacked one on top of the other. He also had a giant overstuffed recliner with a crank for the footrest. The crank no longer worked, and he kept the footrest propped up with a pile of books. When some younger family members bought him a new recliner, he was offended and refused it.
It can be strangely energizing to find out that you can live with a broken thing—it becomes a challenge you choose, repeatedly, to overcome. Or, by living with it, you might be saying something about yourself, and your own impermanent nature. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T. S. Eliot wrote, in “The Waste Land.” That sounds dark. Maybe it really is true that human beings are inherently broken, or at any rate headed that way, and are therefore surrounded by broken or breaking people and the flawed things they’ve created. In which case, the fractured stuff in our lives can remind us to take care, to practice compassion, to remain open-minded. At the end of “The Waste Land,” the poet finds spiritual solace in a broken world; it could even be that it’s the world’s brokenness that lets the light in.
In any case, it’s useful to know that broken things can teach us about our broken selves. If it’s almost good when an inanimate object breaks, because it’s then that we can start to examine it and fix it, then we might see our inner difficulties in a more positive light: it’s when we recognize our thinking as broken that we can start to improve it. Maybe an attitude of wabi-sabi could be appropriate not just to our broken teacups but to our plans, memories, and self-conceptions. Sometimes broken things are actually better that way. We benefit, occasionally, from accidents that seem unfortunate at first. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
