singing society; another who was president of a gun club; another who
owned and made or rather fired pottery for others. Peter was so restless
and vital that he was always branching out in a new direction. To my
astonishment he now took up the making and firing of pottery for
himself, being interested in reproducing various Chinese dishes and
vases of great beauty, the originals of which were in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. His plan was first to copy the design, then buy, shape or
bake the clay at some pottery, then paint or decorate with liquid
porcelain at his own home, and fire. In the course of six or eight
months, working in his rooms Saturdays and Sundays and some mornings
before going to the office, he managed to produce three or four which
satisfied him and which he kept plates of real beauty. The others he
gave away.
A little later, if you please, it was Turkish rug-making on a small
scale, the frame and materials for which he slowly accumulated, and then
providing himself with a pillow, Turkish-fashion, he crossed his legs
before it and began slowly but surely to produce a rug, the colors and
design of which were entirely satisfactory to me. As may be imagined, it
was slow and tedious work, undertaken at odd moments and when there was
nothing else for him to do, always when the light was good and never at
night, for he maintained that the coloring required the best of light.
Before this odd, homely, wooden machine, a combination of unpainted rods
and cords, he would sit, cross-legged or on a bench at times, and pound
and pick and tie and unravel--a most wearisome-looking task to me.
"For heaven's sake," I once observed, "couldn't you think of anything
more interestingly insane to do than this? It's the slowest, most
painstaking work I ever saw."
"That's just it, and that's just why I like it," he replied, never
looking at me but proceeding with his weaving in the most industrious
fashion. "You have just one outstanding fault, Dreiser. You don't know
how to make anything out of the little things of life. You want to
remember that this is an art, not a job. I'm discovering whether I can
make a Turkish carpet or not, and it gives me pleasure. If I can get so
much as one good spot of color worked out, one small portion of the
design, I'll be satisfied. I'll know then that I can do it, the whole
thing, don't you see? Some of these things have been the work of a
lifetime of one man. You call that a small thing? I don't. The pleasure
is in doing it, proving that you can, not in the rug itself." He clacked
and tied, congratulating himself vastly. In due course of time three or
four inches were finished, a soft and yet firm silky fabric, and he was
in great glee over it, showing it to all and insisting that in time (how
long? I often wondered) he would complete it and would then own a
splendid carpet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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