Customer Reviews

The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age

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Once again, Howard Mansfield has produced a brilliant book, as intelligent as it is vital, to show how our heritage is as much a part of us as is our DNA. We struggle to keep it going in a manner suggested by the title, which refers to a well-known story of a man with an ax. The handle breaks and the man replaces it, whereupon the ax head breaks and the man replaces that too. Does the man then have the same ax, or does he have a new one? An arguement could be made either way, but the important aspect of the story is that the man has the ax he needs and has never been without it. For us, the world is our ax, and is breaking apart even as we watch. We want to mend it. We want to keep what we are losing, so we carefully move old houses from the paths of bulldozers, board by board and brick by brick; we form large societies to reenacte battles of the Civil War, the armies outfitted in exact regalia down to the buttons. Such ongoing activity is not the same as the collections of relics found in museums (such as a stoppered vial containing Thomas Edison's last breath, for instance, a relic that Mansfield mentions by contrast.) We are closer to Thomas Edison when we replace a lightbulb than we are when we look at this vial of his breath. If the owner of the ax of the title had wanted a relic, he would have kept his broken ax to look at and acquired a new one to chop wood. No--he mended his old ax. And with our restorational activities, we are trying to mend the word, something that we human beings long to do with every fibre in us. Environmental magazines seem not to have noticed this important fact, nor have any of the preservationist publications. In contrast, Mansfield shows us something extremely important about ourselves in this brilliant and very readable book.

This is not the kind of book I usually read. It's probably not the kind of book that **anyone** usually reads. I bought it because of a favorable review in the New York Times. The review made the book sound good and, what do you know, the book really is good.

Now, I'll never renovate a house. I'll never live in a log cabin or an old stone house. I don't want to live in New England or visit Walden Pond or petition city hall to save an old building. But when I read this book, I found out I was a "Noah." (A "Noah" is someone, according to Mansfield, who tries to preserve things that are beautiful or useful from extinction.)

I encourage you to read this book as an allegory for renewal in your own life. What important things in your own world are threatened by what's new? What can you do to preserve those things you find useful as they're encroached upon by change?

My norm is to buy books on Amazon.com and then sell them on half.com to support my habit. But not this book! This book is staying on my shelf. I'll read it again whenever I'm in need of inspiration or creative insight.

While parts of the book went deeper than my interest, much of it was sheer poetry. The author makes his case, which is better described in some of the other reviews than I could relate.

Tools that once belonged to my father and grandfather always seem to work a little better than the ones I've bought. If you've ever had the same feeling, you'll like the book.

Howard Mansfield has written an immensely insightful book about the ways we see our own past. If you were to say something to fault this book it would be that it has crammed twice too many ideas into half too little space, but for those of us who are tired of books with next to nothing to say, Mansfield delivers a powerhouse of ideas about where we are and where we are going.

From the Wright Brothers to the Gillette razor, Mansfield explores American culture and the complex interplay between who we are and who we think we would like to become. Solid pleasure.

I loved this book! Richly layered, eloquently written, it's the most important book on restoration and preservation to be published in decades, itself a meaningful act of restoration.

*A powerful book with a unique perspective on the following:

--What we can learn from the past

--The fragile finite nature of physical objects and the material world

--How to breathe life into a restoration and learn from it, as opposed
to shellaking it over with a polished artificial veneer

--That the work of restoration is as much about the action of
restoring as about the finished product

--That the work of restoration is never done

*Personal essays and interviews rather than a how-to-manual

*Poetic and thoughtful

*SPECIAL NOTE FOR PEOPLE WITH SEVERE CLUTTER/HOARDING problems*
Please note that for people with a hoarding/severe clutter problem, this will be a hard book to read, because it definitely hammers home the fact of "dust to dust".

You will find a new name for yourself however: a "Noah"! In fact one of the chapters is called "An Arkload of Noahs."

And you might even find for yourself a paradigm 180 degree shift in the way you view the objects you are trying to save. The lesson here may be to save less, so that you conserve your energy to try to protect the objects you love the most. Also to realize that the act of preserving should be one of life-giving affirmation for YOURSELF in the
process. It's what you learn and pass on that matters, more than the actual objects.

*Most interesting fact from the book:
(p. 5) "We have our own shrine,...the U.S.S. Constitution, Old Ironsides, the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world.....The ship has survived some close calls with oblivion....Saving a wooden ship is a job that's never finished. The Constitution has been rebuilt and repaired in 1833, 1858, 1871077, 1906, 1927-30, 1953, 1963-65, 1973-75, and the most recent and most extensive...1992-96. ANYWHERE FROM 10 TO 20 PERCENT OF OLD IRONSIDES IS ORIGINAL." (The rest has been replaced over the years through restoration.)

*Here are some favorite quotes from the book:
(pp. 270-271) "Noah gathered two of all that lived, following some of the most specific instructions in the bible. We aren't always so carefully guided. Voices, visions, burning bushes are given only to a few....All Noahs are like Sadie Huntoon. They pull from the wreck we have made of the world what they can, and time will judge its value."

(p.274) "We must let go of some things--some beloved things--to allow the birth of the new, which at times will be shocking and awkward."

(p. 58) "An earthquake in 1997 destroyed important frescoes in the 13th-century Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, the ceiling came down in thousands of pieces....One Franciscan nun said: Sometimes things
need to be destroyed so they can be renewed."

(p. 58) "All materials are fugitive. Things fade, dry out, crizzle and craze. Glass is a liquid. Mountains are borne to the sea. Life is fugitive."

(p. 275) "Nothing is ever (permanently) saved. ...Restoration is a legacy. The job isn't finished; it is handed off to the next generation of caretakers."

(p. 53) "To the keeper of a historic house, the earth is a science-fiction horror film. Life-giving water rots roofs and dissolves stone; benign sunshine reduces silk curtains to rags, bleaches wood, and cracks leather.....The curators are condemned to live on a planet where the fingertips of earthlings leave behind acid that tarnishes silver, where bronze and pewter are prone to 'diseases,' and dust can defeat a suit of medieval armor.
Life is a fire. Sunlight, air, and water sustain us and destroy us. Life consumes all we wish to save."

(pp. 55-57) "The curators' task is impossible: preserve all this stuff FOREVER. They are in a pitched battle with the elements.....Says Pam Hatchfield, an objects conservator at the museum. At best, you can extend the life with low humidity. 'You have to assume that objects you're using are disposable,' she says. 'No matter how much you love them.'"

(pp. 57-58 )"The philosophers call it EVANESCENCE, the passing from one state to the next. Under the right conditions, ice evanescences to vapor....Evanescence is a wonderful phrase, but when I pry back a board on our old house and reach in, and the beam comes out in moist handfuls like devil's food cake, it's not evanescence, it's rot....Everything
created will rot eventually: the Mona Lisa, the Brooklyn Bridge....The world works to recycle itself.....Without rot, life itself is impossible. Rot probably deserves a better name....Most of life is....maintenance."

(p. 276) "Ours in an age of broken connections...Restoration is renewal--and effort to mend the world--or it is not worth doing. Good restoration is a prayer, an offering. It's praise, attention paid; it revels in the glory and spirit of this life."

I just want to pass on this review from the Spring 2002 issue of ArchitectureBoston:

THE SAME AX, TWICE is one of those quiet books that foments revolution. Although identified as merely "journalist and author" (and by implication, non-scholar?), Howard Mansfield has just the right combination of erudition and humor to challenge conventionally held ideas about historic preservation. Like IN THE MEMORY HOUSE , his wise 1993 exploration of the New Englander's defining relationship with the past, THE SAME AX, TWICE ought to be on your bookshelf along with Wendell Berry and Noel Perrin."
-- William Morgan, Professor of Art, Wheaton College
--

In remaking an ax, in restoring a house, we carry the fire of the original spirit. We commit anew, plant, put our hands to touch the work of a craftsman hundreds of years gone, and then once again feeling that work, pick it up again. And therein lie renewal and hope." --from The Same Ax, Twice.

Moving easily between meditative reflection and compelling insights, Howard Mansfield offers lively descriptions of some of the extraordinary people who are imaginatively, lovingly, sometimes obsessively, realizing their own visions of the restorative impulse.

Mansfield immerses himself deeply in the search for restoration. He travels with Civil War reenactors to help recreate the Battle of Antietam; he enrolls in auctioneer school to observe the endless recycling of artifacts, and he compares the process to the sterile preservation of these same objects in displays and museums; he observes the ongoing work of preserving the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides," a ship which has been replaced over the years board by board.

The act of restoration, Mansfield concludes, whether it's rebuilding antique engines or reviving the village model of community organization, must contain an element of renewal. Rejecting the sentimentality of nostalgia and the superficiality of commercial images, Mansfield argues for an understanding of restoration that is as much concerned with the future as it is with the past, that preserves and communicates a spirit as well as a form.

"The Same Ax, Twice is filled with insight and eloquence... a memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom,"
said The New York Times Book Review.

"The Same Ax, Twice is one of those quiet books that foments revolution," said William Morgan in Boston Architecture. "Howard Mansfield has just the right combination of erudition and humor to challenge conventionally held ideas about historic preservation. Like In the Memory House, his wise 1993 exploration of the New Englander's defining relationship with the past, The Same Ax, Twice ought to be on your bookshelf along with Wendell Berry and Noel Perrin."

"I know I will never think about any part of the past--including my own--in quite the same way ever again. Mansfield just blew me away with this truly remarkable, engaging and yes, inspirational piece of work," said Judson D. Hale, Sr., publisher of Yankee Magazine.

" `The best restorations,' writes Mansfield, `are truly restorative.' Reading this book is equally so," said Publishers Weekly.

Great book at at a great price. Wanted to order 3 but the link was difficult to navigate and I only was billed for 1 and only received 1.

Howard Mansfield's new book commences with a funny yet profound anecdote: An old farmer boasts that he's used the same ax his whole life -- he's only replaced the handle three times and the head twice. You laugh, then pause to think.

Mansfield's point, buttressed in scores of ways over the course of this captivating book, is that the farmer's ax is the same ax, more so than an "antique" entombed in a museum case, perhaps in mint condition but not constantly baptized by sweat in service. We're surrounded by things, some of which endure for centuries whereas others are instant junk. The measure of an object's meaning is its use-fullness: "Does it work?" That farmer's ax works because it's used all the time, but when it comes to the museum ax, no one knows.

Mansfield writes like no one else, assembling richly textured, rhythmically complicated passages that that accumulate like a mosaic. His structure allows amazing jumps and juxtapositions. For instance, in the first stretch of pages he considers igloos, a form unchanged in 50,000 years; Japan's Shinto shrine Ise (rebuilt every twenty years since 690 A.D.); the U.S.S. Constitution, oldest commissioned warship still afloat, and the ship's namesake, our ceaselessly reinterpreted but resilient national constitution; 26,000-year-old exhumed mammoths; the "study houses" analyzed by architectural preservationists; and a Vermont stargazers' club whose members make their own telescopes. It's a wild ride from there on out, encompassing ersatz theme parks and the pageantry of reenactments, Elvis's Graceland and the Shakers' almost extinct utopianism, Robert Frost's daughter's diary and the origins of Old Home Day. One of my favorite segments is the comical tableau of a former pasture filled all weekend with chugging, smoking, hundred-year-old "hit or miss" engines, running just to run. Think of the difference between an early 20th-century farm -- where a single engine was hauled around and hooked up to a dozen or more pieces of equipment doing various jobs -- and an early 21st-century home with its dozens of motorized appliances.

Mansfield contrasts exercises in historical fantasy -- such as Massachusetts's Deerfield Village, where elaborate "renovations" express far better the materialist obsessions of the 1950s than they illuminate the lifeways of colonial forbears -- with the emotionally charged site of Ulysses S. Grant's death, a tiny cottage in upstate New York now surrounded by the razor-wired walls of a prison compound, visited by hardly anyone. This author's erudition is dazzling, but beyond book learning, Mansfield is a great gleaner of talk, weaving learned insights with fabulous gobbets of conversations. The blend of storytelling and scholarship makes a rollicking narrative, fresh in perspective and broad in repercussion. Here's his account of a watershed moment at the dawn of consumerism:

< . . . we know Gillette for the invention and promotion of the safety razor with the disposable blade. It took years for Gillette to convince men to buy and later throw out the blades. He assaulted thrift. Gillette advertised heavily (50 cents for every razor he sold in 1906, for a total of a million dollars). He had to change men's habits. First he had to convince them that they were wasting their time with daily shaves at barbershops, which were like workingman's social clubs. ("If the time, money, energy, and brain-power wasted in the barbershops of America were applied in direct effort, the Panama Canal would be dug in four hours," said one 1906 ad.) After getting men to try his blades, Gillette had to teach them to throw the used ones away. To the company's consternation, many customers had their blades sharpened at hardware stores or bought gadgets to do it themselves. >

What fascinates Mansfield are the ways humans seek to abide in the past's "afterlife," now. The stargazers with their homemade telescopes, the riggers on the U.S.S. Constitution, the painstakingly costumed re-enactors of the battle of Antietam -- all are living lovingly in a kind of penumbra. Our relationships with our heritage can be ridiculous but are often very touching and revealing.

The book's heroes are individuals Mansfield calls "Noahs," each saving some fragile, jeopardized link. Peter Acker trying to harvest on tape samples of aural landscape unencumbered by machine noise, seconds at a time. Patryc Wiggins, using medieval tapestry techniques to create a huge, detailed picture of a turn-of-the-century New Hampshire mill town, an hour per square inch. Poets and pragmatists, auctioneers and machinists, artisans and button savers, these are our caretakers, seasoned practitioners of "the perfection of compromise."

Ultimately Mansfield is celebratory, equal parts gravity and hilarity: "Rot is our inheritance. Rejoice!" Genuine restoration is an expression of down-to-earth optimism: the joiner who while timber-framing a barn plants the hardwood saplings that will yield replacement posts and beams when the time comes for reconstruction. What speaks more tellingly of our future than these ongoing transactions with the past?