The one on the bench

A bookbinder in Irbid gets asked the same question by nearly everyone who visits the workshop. Which of these is the best one you have made?

He used to try to answer. He would pull out the leather copy he bound for a wedding, or the small set of journals that took him a month. Lately he just points at whatever is clamped on the bench, half-glued, not yet trimmed.

It is not modesty. The finished books are finished. He knows exactly what is wrong with each of them, and there is nothing more he can do about it. The one on the bench is still open. Every decision in it is still alive, and so is he while he makes them.

This is what the visitors miss when they ask about the best work. Making things is not mainly a collection of results. It is a way of standing in the gap between what exists and what comes next, and that gap is where the person doing the work feels most awake.

The same is true of a shop window that gets changed every season, a letter rewritten until it finally lands, a market table arranged a little differently each Friday. The pleasure is not in the archive. It is in the attempt that has not happened yet, the one that has not had a chance to disappoint.

Anyone who answers the question with something from the shelf is telling you what they have done. Anyone who points at the bench is telling you who they are.