Week 5. L started coming to class with me the second week, and until recently no matter how hard she tried every piece she threw on the pottery wheel came out as a bowl the size, roughly, of half a large grapefruit. It’s the case with all beginners, and experts too, though more subtle in the latter – after a while you can tell which pieces on the drying table belong to whom. Everyone tends toward their own shape.
That even masters of “no-style” have their own style isn’t a particularly unique observation. What interests me more are the underlying forces, the ones that assign L her grapefruit bowls and someone else their ridged tea cups. The clay is raw material, pure data, we coax it toward a pattern, a particular flavor of logic based on … what? Some abstract unconscious idea of beauty?
Alain de Botton, in The Architecture of Happiness:
To feel that a building is unappealing may simply be to dislike the temperament of the creature or human we dimly recognise in its elevation – just as to call another edifice beautiful is to sense the presence of a character we would like if it took on a living form. What we search for … is not in the end so far from what we search for in a friend. The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.
