God Is in the Details

Dieu Détails
dieudetails
Published in
6 min readDec 31, 2017

Late December 2016. I was leaving my parents’ house in Parkersburg, West Virginia. I had flown into Pittsburgh, three hours north. I would also be leaving by Pittsburgh — but via train.

The ride itself was idyllic enough on the Southwest Chief. To no fault of its own, it would have been better if I weren’t sick and hadn’t already been sleeping badly for a week. This trip to West Virginia showed me that my body had adjusted handsomely to the warm climate of Los Angeles in the nine months since moving here. I got sick almost the second I walked out of the airport in Pittsburgh, where the weather was some absurd temperature below freezing.

North Park Lake, Allison Park, 30 Minutes North of Pittsburgh. Temperature: Freezing.

Tired and aching and my nose running as I lay curled up at an odd angle in my passenger seat, trying to not disturb my train buddy beside me as I nudged my body every few moments to give it more comfort, I longed for the moment I stepped foot back in California — sunny, comfortable, where I could sleep in my own bed again.

It was after one of these sunny daydreams that I reluctantly uncurled myself and wobbled down the narrow staircase to the bathroom. Have you ever been in an old Amtrak train bathroom? If you have any prejudices against the size or sight of airplane bathrooms, let me tell you, those on this train are worse.

The orange laminate, the flimsy metal panelling. The faucet that you didn’t even feel comfortable touching. The paper hand towels that were located just too awkwardly out of the way to convince you that this was supposed to be a bathroom, and not a closet with a toilet. The floor didn’t look dirty, but it didn’t feel clean. And here I was stepping on it. (Unfortunately, I did not think to take a photo of this place.)

I’m sure the newer trains have better bathrooms. But I was not on those trains.

I was on this one, in its dingy bathroom. And it revulsed me. This was not a space in which I wanted to take care of private bodily matters. Being sick made it all the worse: this was not a tiny respite from the crowd of the other passengers where I could blow my nose as intensely as I wanted, it was a claustrophobic box that I never wanted to enter, but had no choice because I was a physiologically functioning human, and some other human had haphazardly and carelessly designed this stall on this train which obliged me to use it morning, day, and night for a three day journey across the country.

I brushed my teeth, looking at my eyes and nothing else, and got out of there and returned to the mediocre comfort of my chair.

Back to my daydreams. That’s when it occurred to me…

God is in the details.

(Or, as I mused in French, Dieu est dans les détails.)

Apple iPhone Multitouch 2007

Understanding human comfort and motion and expectation, and designing a tool or space to consider those innate qualities, is expert craftsmanship. Design is not about how far-out you can make something look; it’s about how near to home you can make its user feel. All design and architecture and objects and spaces exist for one reason: us. Without us, no object or environment matters!

So, how can so much veritable mediocrity exist in the world? It’s all made by other people, after all. How can they not understand how others would interact with their work? Did they not interact with their work? How do they not exert supreme craftsmanship over the thing they’re investing their own life in?

Was the towel dispenser being awkwardly located a compromise to fit it into the small space? For that matter, why use orange? It just got tarnished over time, looking grim instead of uplifting. Was it designed in the 70s, and that palette was simply a testament of its era? (It may have been: the first series of the Superliner cars were made in 1975, and “as of 2012, approximately 245 Superliner I cars were still in service.”)

I will never know for certain. What I knew, was that when I used that bathroom, the details were not divine, not transcendental or homey or comfortable by any means. It was designed to “get the job done.”

And there was no God in that bathroom, let me tell you.

God is in the details. Like an armoire whose carpenter finishes the backside, visible to the world only the handful of times it is moved in its lifetime; like the interior of the Macintosh, which Steve Jobs insisted be as refined as the exterior.

In reflecting on the craftsmanship of his father, Jobs commented that he “loved doing things right.” His father didn’t skimp on the backside, the underside, the inside — and definitely not on the outside. “For you to sleep well at night, the æsthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” (The Next Web)

iMac Pro, 2017

God is in the details. Going the extra mile (or ten or one hundred) in designing Something for human utilization transcends “getting the job done” by leaving a mark in the universe that, even if invisible, its Creator knows is there. And if the Creator knows and no one else notices, it’s a job well done: something so seamless that its qualities were considered in its creation, but don’t need to be observed or fussed over in its utilization.

I was fussing over that bathroom. I never wanted to use it. Whoever created it, cared about something less intimate than its details. They cared about its purpose, but not the utilization and execution of that purpose. They did not care about the people using it.

When you design something bad and force others to use it, your anonymous memory will go down in history with little frustrations and misgivings and giving-ups that you will never know about, but which everyone else will have lived through for a little moment of their lives. This applies to train bathrooms, to architecture, to raising a child, to city streets, to the work you contribute to the world.

The Superliner Railcars on the Southwest Chief

This experience on the train back to Los Angeles has stuck with me for a year now. I’ve wanted to get it out there in some way.

So, this blog and the accompanying Instagram are dedicated to all the little divine details that humans have crafted into the stuff we use and see every single day. It’s dedicated to the humanity etched into the materiality, and it’s dedicated to the inner divinity permeating all of us, and therefore all that we create.

These things are worth glorification, because their quality is not — unfortunately — the standard or by any means universal. Quality craftsmanship tends to be the exception.

Don’t skimp. Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re making, just. don’t. skimp. Someone’s experience depends on it. God is in the details. You are left behind in those details. And, whether personally or anonymously, other people will know you for them.

No matter its magnitude, decide your legacy.

Originally published at timm.life on January 1, 2018.

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