fixing shoes...

A reader, Randall, sent a nice essay about fixing shoes, Save Your Soles, by Barry Boyce.

“It is one of the perverse virtues of advanced civilization to have transcended repair and renewal.”

Entropy teaches us that things will break. And break and break and break. Falling apart, coming undone, deteriorating—this is indeed the lot of anything that comes into existence, and in particular of things produced by the human hand.

Fixing is not the same as making in the first place, but demonstrates (when successful) a power to forestall the inevitable. When unsuccessful, it still represents an active rather than compliant and dependent relationship to the objects that inhabit our lives. Your choice is to be either compliant toward consumer culture, or to rise up against it by fixing things that break and making things that last generations.