It is easy to see the appeal of kintsugi. Brokenness is not usually attractive. Scars are charming to a new lover, perhaps, in the warmth of a new intimacy. That’s when they play their best roles, prompting a reminiscence about a fall from a bike or an accident at school, then drawing attention back to the skin, inviting soothing measures. With age, we gather increasingly more cracks, even as they lose their richness. What 40-year-old has time to tell stories about all the marks life left on her body? What 50-year-old can even count how many parts he has lost to kitchen mishaps, unruly cells, or a fondness for sugar? Our flaws may still be lovely, even in aggregate, but rare is the person who can be bothered to find that beauty in them.
Kintsugi is a stunning reversal of this rule. An object that should have no future — a broken ceramic cup, or jar, or plate — is pieced together with lacquer made from the sap of the urushi tree and its joints are burnished with gold. The fault lines of a prior catastrophe bolt across the object like lightning; now it is the scars that shine bright. A centuries-old Japanese practice of repairing fine ceramics through an arduous, highly specialized, and expensive process becomes a biddable symbol for the beauty of imperfection.
I am in Venice, in search of Jan Morris, the great British travel writer and historian who died last November at the age of 94. I am here with my younger sister, Virginia, who has gamely agreed to a Morris-inspired itinerary. Our guidebook is not Fodor’s or Lonely Planet but Morris’s own The World of Venice, published in 1960 and still in print today. It is a rhapsodic book, zesty and beguiling, about this “lonely hauteur,” this “jumbled, higgledy-piggledy mass,” this “God-built city”: Venezia. Here, “all feels light, spacious, carefree, crystalline,” Morris writes with characteristic aplomb, “as though the decorators of the city had mixed their paints in champagne, and the masons laced their mortar with lavender.”
Youngson was 69 then and 70 when her debut – Meet Me at the Museum – was published. Her first instinct was to see her age as a commercial disadvantage. “I thought they would look at me and think: ’Oh God, how will we promote this?’” But then Meet Me at the Museum was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award, and she had to think again. Her second novel, Three Women and a Boat, was published last year. Now 73, she is midway through writing her third.
As Marris details throughout the book, while there are good reasons to value animals as individuals, there is in fact no unassailable single reason to protect species. However, that realization does not mean we shouldn’t do so, only that we should go about it in a more thoughtful way, with an eye also toward individuals. Ultimately, Marris argues that it’s time to renegotiate our approach to wild animals and conservation to better match the realities of our human-dominated world.
Specktor writes honestly and cogently about each artist’s life as he weaves in his own foibles and experiences as an artist, father, son, and friend. Always Crashing covers a lot of ground, beginning with an explanation of the life-crash that called Specktor back to Los Angeles: his wife leaving him for a co-worker. From there, he measures the impact of F. Scott Fitzgerald on his career; writes eloquently of Eleanor and Frank Perry of Diary of a Mad Housewife; pens a psychological study of actress Tuesday Weld; and divulges Warren Zevon’s flaws.