An afternoon of a book, a cafe, a friend, much good talking and only a little work done.
<a href='http://samwilson.id.au/2003/11/05/clouds-above-the-grass/im000675/' rel="attachment wp-att-218"><img src="http://samwilson.id.au/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/im000675-300x225.jpg" alt="" title="Docked door jamb" width="300" height="225" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-218" srcset="http://localhost/~sam/wp-samwilson.id.au/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/im000675-300x225.jpg 300w, http://localhost/~sam/wp-samwilson.id.au/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/im000675.jpg 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>William Morris’ lectures on Art and Socialism from the last quarter of the 19th century kept me company in a juice bar in town this afternoon, but only for a short while before the noise got to me. Morris really does give me a lot to think about, almost all of it good or exciting; I find him attempting to answer many of the same questions that have come to me in recent years, and in a manner wholely fascinating and indeed often congruent with my way of thinking.
“To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it.
Does not our subject look important enought now? I say that without these arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, out labour mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind.” — William Morris, The Lesser Arts, 1877.
This ‘decoration’, could it not also include something that one could term ‘decoration of activity’? Those non-functional things that one does when working such as enjoying the sound of a sharp handsaw as it cuts, or being in an attractive workshop. Or am I just a bit too tired to be thinking more about this?
The jamb that I picked up earlier I docked in two and would’ve started planing but had tea instead.