Kintsugi and Courts.

"Kintsugi," Wikipedia. 

available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

A "thank-you" to Pat Brown first, for linking to an image of a piece of Japanese ceramic ware. The picture illustrates Kintsugi, the Japanese technique for repairing broken pottery, using a lacquer or resin sprinkled with powdered gold.

The æsthetic value of Kintsugi comes from the marks of wear, an inevitability for the handiwork of humans in a land of earthquakes (like Japan or California). Kintsugi highlights the cracks and repairs as simply an event in life, rather than allowing service to end at the time of the damage. Kintsugi does not attempt to hide the injury, but instead "the repair is illuminated," illustrating the vicissitudes of existence.

"Napa County Courthouse Plaza," Wikipedia.

image available at http://tinyurl.com/lg26yxc

Given the beauty of the bowl pictured, it made me think of the recent damage to the Napa County courthouse in the 2014 South Napa Earthquake.  I have an emotional attachment to the structure, having been sworn in as an attorney there before my first trial. How fitting would it be, I thought, to embrace Kintsugi in the context of the High Victorian Italianate architecture of the historic 1878 structure?

Such a reminder seems somehow particularly appropriate for a building dedicated to law. To quote Holmes, law is a series of painful steps and world-shaking contests "by which mankind has worked and fought from savage isolation to organic social life." Law does not flow from some mysterious omnipresence in the sky, but is instead the consequence of the work of minds and hands. It is subject to crisis, disillusionment, and despair, much like pottery inevitably suffers breaks, knocks, and shattering in daily life.  Yet the æsthetic value shared by precious pottery, and even-more-precious justice, when joined by illumination, can make each more beautiful, and perhaps both even stronger for the history -- not less.