Truth is a hard thing to come by these days.

I was listening to this book called Deep Work, and the author, Cal Newport, started one of the chapters talking about a blacksmith. A modern blacksmith, a guy named Richard Furrer, who nevertheless makes swords. Old-looking, cool looking swords.

Newly forged swords are clearly a luxury product or a film prop. Like, nobody NEEDS a medieval sword. But Furrer had something very interesting to say about his work:

“I don’t need a sword, but I have to make them.”

In other words, making swords, shaping them through the sweaty process of heating and hammering, is intrinsically meaningful to Furrer.

When you hear him talk about the process, it’s easy to see why. He has to be focused every second — he has to hammer the metal exactly right, and every decision he makes shapes the next set of decisions. Even near the end of the process, it’s very easy to ruin the work, and the intensity and timing of metalworking necessitate razor sharp (lol) attention.

Newport talks, too, about a pair of scholars named Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. They wrote a book called All Things Shining, and are really interested in our feeling of meaning, and what’s happened to meaning in our modern lives. They argue that once religion falls apart as a unifying cultural narrative, once we each become individuals with control over our own destiny, we also get the job of having to make our own meaning ourselves. Nobody gives us outside meaning — meaning is something we have to search for, conjure, or create.

This can be a difficult and depressing task. It’s easy to feel like the meaning we make for ourselves is bullshit — like we’re just building castles in the air; like we could change our mind and it would all come crashing down, like everything is empty.

Dreyfus and Kelly, though, locate an interesting place to find reliable meaning — in craft.

This is where we come back to the swords, obviously.

When we’re interacting with physical reality and bending it to our will, there are certain rules. The metal will behave in certain ways. It will stop us short, it will enforce its will, it will shape us as surely as we shape it. If we don’t do what it demands, we don’t get the result we want.

This is a solid foundation on which to build a relationship with the world. This is meaning, goal, focus, delivered through an incredibly simple task. Or, the parameters are simple. The process is hard. Hammering a sword is not easy.

But most of us don’t get to make swords. So how do we access this grounding feeling of meaning?

Well, obviously we can do our own physical crafts. We can carve furniture, paint paintings, farm plants. We can set goals and deal with processes that force us to have a relationship with the immovable. We can do science. We can exercise or learn a sport. It’s that process of perfection, of struggling to contend with the limits of our materials, that allows us to feel the edges of reality and figure out what the “truth” of that physical circumstance is.

But plenty of us, again, work in the realm of ideas or aesthetics. We spend so much of our time on the abstracted internet. Is there meaning to be found here?

Well, when I write something, I’m attempting to achieve a purpose. I want to realize a vision, a feeling. I want to communicate, and affect people. And those are material constraints too — people respond to certain things. Writing works in certain ways. When you come down to it, all circumstances are physical.

But then we arrive at a deeper problem: is this actually satisfying? Is the mere process of making a sword a workable substitute for God?

Well, when I talk about it abstractly like that, no, probably not. It sounds very simple and hapless. Who cares about a sword?

But when you’re in that moment, sweating out your pores and eyeballing the next fall of the hammer, something different is happening inside you. You’re not spread out, you’re narrowed to a point. Your universe contracts and expands around your breath and your striking motion, and you feel the heat of the sparks and the reverberation of the blow. You’re small enough not to need a vast and complex net of meanings. You slip through the fabric of reality like a needle. You contend with the world like you’re having sex.

Maybe the question isn’t whether or not a sword is enough. Maybe it’s our job to MAKE it enough.

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