Creating
It’s astonishing, really—how little time it takes to destroy a thing and how much more it takes to create.
I thought about this several times in the past week as I walked across the campus where I work. Prather Hall (also called Music Hall for those of a particular era) had long outlived its usefulness to the university. Built in 1906 as the stately home of the university president, Prather suffered the fate of countless structures at countless institutions over the decades—fallen into disrepair only to be repurposed and patched up dozens of times, always enough to get by but never worth the expense of full maintenance or renovation.
A couple of years ago, Prather finally received its death notice. There were hurdles to clear and a pandemic to navigate, but by Thanksgiving the backhoe was poised and ready, silently waiting to inflict the inevitable on this once grand old house.
Its destruction took barely a day. When I went to work in the morning, the building was there. When I came home for lunch, all that was left was to haul away the rubble.
I’m not sad about Prather’s demise. The place was already a dump before I started work on campus, so much so that the signboard in the entryway listed third-floor residents simply with three clip-art bats. I missed its glory days and have no real memories tied to it. Besides, whatever gene prompts people toward nostalgia is largely missing from my DNA.
Still, walking by that backhoe every day and knowing what was coming? If that’s not a metaphor for middle age, I don’t know what is.
As Prather was coming down, my friend Ashley was moving into a new home she and her family had built south of town. I don’t know exactly how long construction had been underway, but it was a very long time. Some time in the summer, she showed me a photograph of new siding and recently installed windows. From the outside, it looked ready for them to move in.
It wasn’t, of course. So much still needed to be done on the interior—wiring and insulation, plumbing, drywall, baseboards, flooring, painting, and much more than that. It was an agonizingly slow process, as is usually the case for new construction of any type. More than once, Ashley wondered aloud if they would move in before their middle-schooler graduated from high school.
Taken alongside the destruction of the old president’s home, the snail’s pace of new construction comes into even sharper relief. It takes a long time to create, and a very little time to tear down.
I used to teach this idea in my pop-culture and theology class using Andy Crouch’s marvelous book Culture Making. He devotes a fair amount of time to exploring why it takes so long for positive cultural change to happen, and why it takes relatively little time for all or part of a culture to be ripped apart, often by a small number of people. The only way to change culture, he asserts, is to create more culture, which takes time and effort from a large number of groups and institutions who somehow find a way to work together.
It takes one operator to work a backhoe. But it takes a small army of builders to create a home.
This, I think, is one of the real frustrations of modern work. We are no longer craftsmen and women who begin with raw materials and create something new through processes we understand and participate in. Rather, we are specialists who do very specific things in very limited spheres. It’s hard to see how what we do matters in the big picture, and even harder to keep working to build better world when so few seem to be engaged in that task with us.
This is why I write fiction—at least, it’s part of the reason. My latest novel won’t win a Pulitzer Prize. It will never be on a bestseller list. And turning a profit? Please, don’t even. It took years to write and months to get ready to print, but it can be read in hours and reviewed in minutes. It feels like a lot of effort for not a lot of return.
But there is something about knowing you’ve created a thing, whether it’s a novel or a crocheted blanket or a drawing on your mom’s fridge. You know your work is fragile, susceptible to water and fire and time and neglect. It won’t last forever, and other people may not even like it. Still, it’s yours, and you can say you made it. You’ve showed a dogged determination in the face of failure and discouragement, and you’ve brought a new thing into the world.
I think that is a wonderful kind of person to be, and I’m trying hard to live into it myself.
