Encounters With Excellence
Recently a friend led me down a narrow spiral staircase and into the crypt of St Martin-in-the Fields Church at Trafalgar Square, landing us in a bright little corner nook that serves, among other things, as a book store. Our original destination was the adjacent coffee shop so we steered left and exited, but soon enough, we were drawn back to that nook. I was enthralled. It wasn’t that it had a wide variety of books—I had been to a number of far better stocked bookshops just that weekend. It was rather the kind of books that it stocked: beautifully rendered editions of some of our favourite classics.
I picked up a few, including two poetry collections. To my credit, difficult as it was, after a couple of tries, I managed to shelf back the Wordsworth Luxe Collection edition of Jane Austen’s Emma. My highly marked up Penguin edition would do. Oh but these books were all so beautiful. My favourite new acquisition was a hardcover of The Great Gatsby. Also a Wordsworth Luxe Edition. It looks so exquisitely put together and by someone who obviously loves books. Substantial but comfortably portable, five and half by eight and a half inches, powder blue hardcover with the gold detail, the edges dusted in a cerulean hue.
It is a great read, and of course the story itself remains exactly the same whether you read this hardcover, a paperback version or an ebook. But I was moved deeply by the tribute that this edition paid to its material. Excellence paying homage to excellence.
As an indie book publisher in the idealistic madness of another life, I know the economics of publishing are such that this is not something you can do with every book. I know.
Still. It is such a balm to the soul to encounter excellence, or at the very least, an unabashed striving after it.
Excellence need not be out of reach of the modest pocket, either. It can happen in other less gold-gilded, more pocket conscious ways. It begins, in publishing, with the care with which words are strung together, to the editorial rigour that brings the best out of the author, to how the pages are laid out and designed to focus on and enhance the story, to the paper you pick and the printer you choose. Every step of the way, a commitment to excellence is an expression of love and care for a thing. Not just for the physical book itself but for the ideas it contains and the lives it will impact.
Once upon a time I worked for an organisation that owned moderately-sized office premises in a suburb of Nairobi, complete with a lush garden back, front and around. One of my absolute favourite things about working in that compound was how our garden was tended. Lisalisa, the gardner, probably late forties, early fifties back then, bounded about the compound daily in overalls and wellingtons, garden tools in hand, about his business. If you had the time, he always had a story to regale you with. If you did not, he smiled and waved. What I remember most about him was how much he loved his job. How he brought a deep sense of pride, flair and zeal to it. Low lying flower bushes, main character in the garden’s opera, bougainvillea and such, were his sculptor’s clay and he was forever rendering them into all manner of beautiful, creative things: a smiling face today, the shape of a tea kettle next month, a star of David come advent season. It was an immaculately kept garden, the kind the only response to which is to linger.
I am certain that I do not need to convince you how much such striving for excellence edifies the soul if you have been in its presence.
A turn of phrase by Jessica Care Moore that reaches right where it itches, and scratches. Steph Curry sealing the deal for Team USA against France in the Paris Olympics with that golden dagger over Nicolas Batum and Evan Fournier. A breathtaking rendition of the Nairobi skyline by Mutua Matheka. When you first grasp what Rushdie is trying to pull off in Midnight’s Children. The Tabernacle Choir performing Mack Wilberg’s arrangement of that great hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. That exquisitely prepared and artfully presented home cooked meal. Opening your friend’s new App to test it and finding its user flow flawless. Listening to CeCe Winans in live concert. Standing in the middle of King’s College Chapel. The gorgeous dress Monica made herself for her wedding.
Excellence is all around us. When we see it, we cannot help but catch our breath. It stops us in our tracks. We recognise that we are in the presence of arete. Human beings operating in the full realisation of their potential. Human beings putting their very best into the mundane and the extraordinary alike. Fine craftsmanship is a source of wonder. Excellence touches something deep inside of us and demands a response. It points to something bigger, someone bigger, the ultimate source and ultimate audience of excellence.
There’s more: there’s the joy that those who pursue excellence bring to the task itself and to the product of the task. It’s palpable. It’s undeniable. Alongside excellence and pushing the boundaries comes pride in the accomplishment, but also, joy.
Because it is presented to us so flawlessly, it is easy to underestimate how much has gone into achieving excellence.
Lisalisa snipped and cropped a bush into the shape of a puppy for an hour perhaps, which in itself is painstaking effort. But how much time he spent thinking about what he wanted to render next and how he would render it is unaccounted for. As is all the time he took to master the skill to turn a bush into a work of art. To sharpen and master his craft.
In Court of Gold, the documentary about the basketball gold medal quest at the Paris Olympics, Steph Curry reflects on that golden dagger moment. It was his fourth three-pointer in the last two minutes of the gold medal game at a time when Wembenyama and his teammates were still pressing hard, determined to stay in the game, spurred on by a boisterous home crowd. He had done it so many times, he said, that once he set it up and shot, he knew that if it didn’t get blocked, it was going in.
The done it so many times is the key. He’s not talking about doing it in competitive play, before a crowd, but on the everyday court, in practice. That is where the secret sauce is cooked. That is where excellence is brewed. Curry is famous for having one of the most rigorous practice routines in the NBA. He pushes himself intensely. Everyday. When he wasn’t performing at the top of his game at the beginning of the Paris tournament, that’s what he fell back on. He just kept pushing himself in practice. So much so that coach Kerr told him to ease up. Take a break. But he wouldn’t. Because he understands what it takes. It’s that kind of commitment and discipline that gives you the confidence to go to the coach during a high stakes moment and say, give me the ball, I know what I want to do with it. And the rest is basketball history.
Gabriel Marquez’s short story Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon is a startling fable, deceptively simple yet richly layered, as is much of Marquez’s writing. Ultimately, it is the story of how a poor man’s fine craftsmanship, his work of undeniable excellence, allows him to temporarily, and perhaps irrationally, upend the social hierarchy and play benefactor to a rich and powerful man’s son.
Pepe, the son of the rich man, commissions Balthazar to build him a cage. Balthazar labours diligently over it for two weeks, neglecting all else. He doesn’t shave. He almost doesn’t sleep. When it’s done, the whole town is abuzz with news of it—it’s the most beautiful cage the town has ever seen, the most beautiful cage in the world. His house is bursting at the seams with people come to behold this beautiful thing. A true work of art. But for Balthazar, it’s just another cage because he had been making cages since he was a child and it took him just about the same amount of effort. The excellence oozes out of him now, it is the mode in which he operates.
Along comes a doctor who has heard about the beauty of the cage and wants to purchase it for his wife. When he beholds it, it surpasses even his high expectations. He heaps compliments on Balthazar. He calls the cage a flight of the imagination and tells Balthazar he would have been an extraordinary architect on account of the complex three-storied structure he has designed and built. Balthazar, only a poor man, receives this high praise with a blush. The doctor then offers to buy the cage. Balthazar refuses. He built it for Pepe, it’s going to Pepe.
So Balthazar dresses up and takes it to Jose Montiel’s, the rich man’s, Pepe’s father’s, house. Except when Montiel learns of its existence and the expectation of payment, he is livid. Balthazar should never have taken a commission from a child without consulting his father. He scoffs and orders Balthazar to leave with his cage at once. Pepe, Montiel’s son, throws a tantrum and his wife, gripped with wonder at Balthazar’s creation alongside all the other townspeople, beseeches Montiel to let their son have it. Montiel stubbornly refuses to yield. Balthazar, seeing Pepe’s distress, gives the cage to the boy for nothing at all and walks away. It is his. It was made for him.
The poor man becomes the rich man’s son’s benefactor and then turns and walks away, head held high.
Between this dramatic climax and the end of the story, is an equally dramatic spiral: Balthazar becomes rowdy along with some hanger on townspeople who think he’s been paid for his magnificent work. He spends money he does not have, gets debauched while his wife waits at home for him, and gets robbed as he lies spread eagled on the street, abandoned by his fickle admirers.
The poor man is further back from where he began because he has left his watch at the pawn shop to pay for his revelry and his shoes have been stolen from him. I have a sense that I should pity him but I find that I cannot. He now carries the knowledge that he is the man who built the most beautiful cage in the world. He is a man capable of doing that. That is a bright light to carry indeed. He has done it once, he can do it again.
Andy Crouch poses an interesting challenge towards the end of his book, Culture Making. Throughout the book he has made the case that The New Jerusalem is the culmination of the great story God began writing for humanity in the garden of Eden. Cities, he argues, are the locus for the peak in human achievement and culture, and this is what The New Jerusalem will be: the apex of culture. His challenge is to always ask ourselves as we go about this life, what parts of what we do now deserves to find a place in The New Jerusalem? Books as part of its libraries, art to hang on its walls, music to serenade its citizens as they stroll the streets in the early evening.
I rather think that Balthazar’s cage for Pepe would find a place of pride in that city.