Sarah Morgan
The Japanese make an art of repairing broken pottery with deliberately visible gold solder. They call it golden joinery, kintsugi or kintshugi, or golden repair, kintsukuroi.
If you Google, you see all kinds of sentiments about “the piece is more beautiful for having been broken” and “when something’s suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.”
Lovely. Also, kind of crap.
I may feel this way because I’m a bit bitter about my scars. Yes, I believe that experience is the only path to wisdom. Getting kicked around a little bit by life makes you understand the world and other people in a way that living a cosseted, sheltered existence just never can.
But wisdom and beauty aren’t the same thing. Is brokenness and damage really always more beautiful than what’s been protected?
