Here are some items I appreciate: growing things (galanthus nivalis, say, given the season), paintings (the cliff-top church in Turner’s “Folkestone from the sea” is where we got married), combinations of poetry and music (Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden, Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt…), great prose (“… bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air…”) and slightly obscure wine regions (the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon). Plus this.This is an engine block. It contains the moving bits like pistons and valves. It is cast from molten metal and many external surfaces carry the rough imprint of the mould because there is no need to polish them. Other surfaces, which have precise dimensional relationships, are machined until this is the case.
Some areas requiring this work are circular holes. Yet circles cannot be precise since they depend on a calculation involving π (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) and π is not an exact value. So how come the holes end up the right size? The answer has to do with tolerances, a quality shared with the translation into English of the first sentence of Proust’s A la recherche…
My blog is linked to that of Relucent Reader whose father was a precision machinist. This seemed an admirable activity until RR pointed out his dad found the work stressful. And why not? Working to tiny fractions of an inch (and it would have been inches, then) is more demanding, and carries more responsibility, than the way I earned my living and which I fondly imagined to be an adrenalin job.
The block reminds me of these things.
