Perhaps it’s symbolic that the very day I began reading The World Beyond Your Head, I put my car in the shop for a new oil filter and air filter. Later, as I did the knowledge-worker thing on Matthew Crawford’s new book, manipulating abstract concepts right and left, it hit me that the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft would be disappointed.
“Why didn’t you fix the car yourself?” he would ask. Why had I missed yet another chance to test myself against the gritty complexity of the tangible world? After all, Crawford so eloquently writes, “It is in the encounter between the self and the brute alien otherness of the real that beautiful things become possible.”
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