A Brief History of Shop Time

Whenever I build a piece of furniture, I keep a log of the time I spend at each step in construction: 60 minutes to glue the top, 75 minutes to cut the mortises and tenons, 30 minutes to remake a munged-up apron.

The reason I keep this record is a bit of mystery to me. I immediately pitch the chicken-scratched log when I purge the shop of the shavings, scraps and screw-ups at the end of a project. But before I cast the log into the burn pile, I always add up the minutes I’ve marked there and marvel at how few hours there are in my life that are spent actually woodworking. I spend most of my days dealing with woodworking: writing about it, reading about it, answering questions about it, thinking about it. But when it comes down to counting the minutes I spend with my hands on the tools, I always feel like I’ve been cheated.

Now I don’t like to get too philosophical about something so physical, but the hours (even minutes) that I spend at woodworking are some of the best waking moments I have. And recently an acquaintance named Brian Welch passed on to me a passage from chapter 18 Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” that seized me by the shoulders and shook me good. Some part of this passage is certain to end up in the next issue of Woodworking Magazine, but I wanted to share the full text with you here:

“There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, …?It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.’

“By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with  precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?”

This afternoon I got in my truck on my day off and braved the traffic to go to the office (which is by Kenwood Towne Centre , the center of all things commercial in Cincinnati) to do a little work on the leg vise for my English Workbench.

I logged only 75 minutes, but it was the best month of the entire day.

– Christopher Schwarz