Like many an American father, I receive the stereotypical gift of socks almost every year for Christmas. I have been pleased to discover that this gift is not at all as unsatisfying as any number of media depictions make it seem, nor does the banality of the item in question detract from its being welcome. I am, as it turns out, constantly in need of socks, and being able to count on a yearly influx feels like one of the few stable cornerstones of my adult existence. Of course, I have any number of pairs from previous years, and yet one or the other or both are always getting lost, and I have an incredible capacity to quickly and brutally run holes into my footwear, especially socks. This problem has gotten so bad that even with this yearly shower of hosiery, I am frequently in the unhappy position of having no clean, hole-free socks at hand. In the hopes of remedying this situation, I made it known to those in power that I wanted a darning kit for Christmas, which I thus received.
Once the splendor and cheer of Christmas day and dinner had subsided and the evening crept on with all peace and quiet, I riffled my drawers and uncovered those frowning, damaged socks haphazardly stuck between miscellaneous articles, paired with foreign partners, and riddled with holes from many a shoeless jaunt over the grass or aggregate of my yard. I positioned my darning mushroom, fastened the sock to it by a hair tie, and proceeded to weave new life into these gloomy objects, at times with prompt success, at other times with multiple do-overs. I have been at my darning now several weeks, and I can happily report that a number of socks have been renewed and that the practice is salutary for both one’s wardrobe and one’s soul.
I have written about the spiritual dimensions of crafts before, but only in relation to the creation of new objects—baskets, specifically—which has a different kind of resonance than does repair. While a degree of silence and self-forgetfulness, the channeling of form into chaos, the harmonization of the spheres so present in creative pursuits does occur in darning, there is another dimension, that of care, indeed of respect for the object at hand, that dominates. Those of us accustomed to the material abundance of modern Western existence are all too used to throwing away cheap objects (or indeed expensive objects, if we can afford it) once they have begun to break down and fail in their given tasks. We are given so much abundance that this is rarely a hardship—few Americans, at least, need darn their socks for economic terrors—and yet repair is one of the shortest routes to a deepened relationship with the things around us, to what I might be so bold as to call a mutual regard. For the object seems to respond, to greet one with a renewed vigor in the performance of its task in gratitude to the healing that one has bestowed upon it or in response to the intimacy one has gained with it.
Besides this augmentation of utility, repaired objects take on a deeper beauty. This is most obviously the case in that wonderful Japanese art kintsugi—wherein gold lacquer is used to fuse together pieces of tea ware and other pottery—but it can be seen in any mended thing. Part of this beauty is purely aesthetic. Depending on one’s choices of material, a darned sock takes on a wider color palette and a greater diversity of texture. When closely woven, a darning patch becomes essentially a new piece of fabric intermeshed with the old, and the relationship of the two becomes more and more seamless as the sock is worn. The personality of the garment is increased radically, and this in perfect alignment with its utility, for the beauty of darning is a homely beauty, one born out of the utility that dictates the wave.
And yet there is another sense in which a repaired item shows increased personality, one that goes beyond the purely aesthetic, and even beyond use. A fixed object suddenly has a story much deeper than what it possessed before, a story that intertwines with one’s own, or indeed with that of future generations, in sometimes remarkable ways. On one of my shelves, for instance, sits a dark blue teapot painted with floral banners that my wife inherited from her great-grandmother on the latter’s passing only a few years ago. While the pot’s original design is pleasing, we no longer trust it to hold liquid, and it has been kept in the family primarily because of the story of its repair, the lines of which can still be seen if one looks closely. My wife’s great-grandmother bought it as a girl, and though she was fond of the pot, she was not overly attached to it. For one reason or another, however, her father came to think it of great significance to her, and so when he accidently knocked it off the shelf, shattering it into numerous pieces, he stayed up late into the night meticulously gluing each piece back into a whole. Needless to say, his daughter thenceforth held the pot very closely, and passed it on when she died. I think about it frequently, and take it out on occasion to again examine the almost perfectly fused joints and the small chips in the enamel. Though it has almost lost its usefulness and the cracks add little aesthetic interest (or indeed detract from it), the pot is invaluable to those who know its history.
Something similar happens when darning socks. For having spent the time to mend my hosiery, I cannot help but view them with deepened interest. Having spent time examining their weave and contours, I know them more intimately. But I have also given them a part of myself—I have put my mark on them and they on me. They are distinct, and we now share a history, have sat down and looked at each other, perhaps for some time, eye to eye.
Having placed oneself in such intimacy with an object and then gone on to continue a use relationship wherein that intimacy is deepened, one beings to see the warm looks of such objects with friendliness, as recalling shared stories and joint endeavors. As the great champion of Japanese folk-crafts Soetsu Yanagi once argued, the great beauty inherent in well-made everyday objects arises not from individual artistic genius but from nature, from life, and from these forces flowing through the artisan. In darning, as in all repair, one begins to feel that life more deeply, to feel how it is shared with surrounding things.
This is an attitude that we ought to cultivate with all objects. We should know their personalities intimately. We should give to them of ourselves, care about them deeply enough to repair them whenever we can. It needs no pointing out that such care is direly needed in much modern living, where it is sorely lacking.
Of course, part of the problem with so many modern utilitarian objects is that they are low quality. They do not earn our respect because they are not made to last, to take a durable place in our day-to-day lives in which they might over time become beloved. Nor are such objects—ineptly mass produced for the purposes of profit—marked by any beauty. Their only purpose is to fulfill a need cheaply and, failing this, they are quickly discarded and replaced, usually by other mediocre objects. If some decoration is slapped onto such items, it is almost always of the flimsiest sort, and will wear away as the object inevitably and quickly decays. While such a system may allow for greater access to necessary quotidian tools, there is an immense price to pay. As Yanagi states in The Beauty of Everyday Things,
In the past, everyday objects were treated with care, with something verging on respect. While this attitude may in part have been a result of the scarcity of goods in past times, I believe it principally resulted from the honest quality of their workmanship and the fact that the more an object was used, the more its beauty became apparent. As our constant companions in life, such objects gave birth to a feeling of intimacy and even affection. The relation between people and things then was much deeper than it is today. When a person could point to what he was wearing and say, “This belonged to my grandfather,” it was a source of pride. These days, however, the careless way things are made has robbed us of any respect of affection.
While the low quality of goods has certainly affected our attitudes to the objects around us, it is also true that this lack of quality is a symptom of a deeper malaise of the human spirit, a simultaneous rapacity and alienation wherein the world is seen as something separate from ourselves, exterior and other, with which one may deal in whatever way is most suited to one’s desires or purposes. Not only our possessions, but the vegetal and animal kingdoms, and even human beings, are frequently objectified in this way. While it is certainly correct to be more concerned with the latter, more grievous instances of this misperception, we are deluded if we think we can continue in our exploitative habits on the level of inanimate being without thereby damaging our other relationships. We must rather seek to change our ways completely, and doing so is invariably easier on the simpler levels.
I don’t want to argue that darning socks, or any private practice whatever, will solve the malaise of alienation and exploitation so powerfully affecting our age. Such horrors are themselves symptoms of deeper, wider issues—diseased socioeconomic structures, rampant greed of vile zeitgeists, rogue angels, billionaires, and other things of malicious countenance. No personal practice is going to solve the hydra of problems besetting the moment. And yet such practices can still shift our own attitudes and experiences so that, at the very least, we are not as beholden to the sins of our time. We are caught in a veritable war of the spirit, after all, as Yanagi himself tacitly suggests in the religious parallels he frequently draws in discussing the importance of everyday folk-craft beauty:
If it is our ideal to live in a world surrounded by beautiful things, in a virtual Kingdom of Beauty, then we must raise the ordinary things of our daily lives to a higher level. . . . Religious leaders attempt to reach the hearts of the masses in order to save the world. Why then don’t those who strive to become artisans seek to save the folk arts? Unless they are saved, the world will turn out to be a very dull place.
Though such war shall not be won by individual powers, it is worthwhile being on the right side, to strive for the Kingdom of Beauty in whatever forms of action and relationality we are capable of. And it is pellucidly clear, I believe, that the side that seeks this Kingdom, that strives against viciousness and ugliness—is the side that darns its socks.