Literary Corner: The Internet Cleanse Cycle, Part I

Korean tea bowl, 16th century, with gold kintsugi repair work, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, via Wikipedia. 

From David Brooks, "Longing For an Internet Cleanse":

Kintsugi¹

By David F. Brooks

They look like they have golden veins
running through them, making them more
beautiful and more valuable² than
they were in their original condition.
There’s a dimension of depth³ to them. You sense
the original life they had, the rupture and then
the way they were so beautifully healed.
And of course they stand as a metaphor⁴
for the people, families and societies
we all know who have endured their own
ruptures and come back beautiful,
vulnerable and whole in their broken places.⁵

¹ The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer colored with the dust of precious metals, so that the break remains visible as a gold or silver seam, and the associated philosophical view that an object has its own life, of service, which is not ended by breakage, and can be restored.

² In the first wave of its popularity in the late 15th century, it's said collectors often smashed valuable pieces for the opportunity to turn them into kintsugi bowls, the way our wealthy philanthropists vote against a government-run social safety net in order to ensure a supply of broken people they can fix.

³ Unlike unmended bowls, which are always two-dimensional?

⁴ Of course! In reality, making the thing into a metaphor is the most un-Japanese thing you can possibly do with it. The deepest idea of the kintzugi philosophy is that of the mono no aware, the poignancy of things, in themselves, not as representatives of something else; as deserving the same tenderness we want for ourselves.

⁵ "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. Most, I think the point is, aren't. The old tea bowl is in fact as strong as ever after the kintsugi work, though the Japanese beauty of the gold seam consists in its reminder of past suffering; the damaged human rarely is. You can send your broken human to the shop to see what they can do, but it really would have been better if it hadn't happened.