Mark and I are doing some re-organization over the break, getting the mechanical room set up with grow lights for vegetable starts which we'll begin in a month. Re-organizing included sorting through boxes and the book boxes slowed me down a fair bit. I came across a 1947 reprint of Audels Carpenters & Builders Guide, initially published in 1923. I believe the book initially belonged to Loyd Anderson, Mark's Grandfather, and that we acquired it after he died. The leather-bound well-illustrated book opens with a quote by John Ruskin, who I learned (on Wikipedia!) lived between 1819-1900. Ruskin was an English art critic and patron, writer, draughtsman, watercolourist, social thinker and philanthropist. The quote inspires me on all sorts of levels:
"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our father did for us.'"
May we all work and build given the economic and social challenges of our day with such intention.
