Hidden virtue

Waiting for my train to Epsom at Earlsfield yesterday afternoon, I had time to take a look at the advertising hoarding under construction at the town end of the platform. I was struck by the sloppy appearance of the work, not very well illustrated.

We suppose that this sloppiness, which will be covered up in due course by lining paper and by advertisements, will be invisible.

We further suppose that it has no bearing on the structural integrity of the hoarding.

Does it then matter?

I associate to all kinds of hidden virtue in carpentry. For example, the oval nails used to fix architrave to a door frame are neatly placed, in pairs, at regular intervals up the door frame. One is irritated if the placement is not neat, or if one misses a nail, or hits a nail badly, and makes an unsightly dent in the architrave. This despite the fact that it will all be hidden from the eye of the proud housewife by filler and paint. One can see if one knows to look, but one usually doesn't.

Another example would be the neat placement of the pins through to the back rail which used to be used to fix the bottom of a drawer in place. Again, one was irritated if the placement & punching was not neat. This despite the fact that it might never be seen again: even proud housewives do not take their drawers out to inspect their undersides that often.

A rather different sort of example would be the care a mathematics lecturer once took with all his epsilons, to make sure that all the bits of epsilons added up to exactly one epsilon at the end of his proof. Or the care that many programmers take with the names they assign variables, most programmers being the sort of people who like to be neat and tidy about such things. Two more example of our taking the trouble to be neat in places that do not much matter for practical purposes and at which no-one much is going to look.

I associate also to the man-years of careful & neat workmanship which went into the glass house at Bicton (see reference 1).

For me, the quality of life is diminished to the extent that we do not take care in such matters. I believe that the quality of life of the carpenters at Earlsfield is diminished to the extent that they bash their nails and screws in without much care. Perhaps they are too busy listening to the radios which seem to be a mandatory accompaniment to such activities these days to have brain cycles left over for neatness. Perhaps they are too much under the whip of the driving overseer to be able to afford the luxury of neatness.

I am sure that Lévi-Strauss would have something to say about all this, being very fond of making primitives (for want of a better word) neat and tidy by imposing all kinds of vaguely mathematical structures on their affairs.

PS: image enlargement on click back to old-style again this morning for this new image. Yesterday's images still new-style so it must be a post bound problem rather than a view bound problem.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/a-botanical-gem.html.