This all came before

http://youtu.be/YTdCzIduUb4

He was told a story of a shoe maker who lived in Poland during the second world war, but it wasn’t one of those stories where the shoe maker winds up hiding Jews somewhere in his floor, or developing an awareness of his centrality or general likeness to his fellow humankind. No, the story was about the really fine shoes that this particular man in Poland made throughout the war. And, even after Warsaw was sacked and the man’s shop was reduced to rubble, he showed up the next day and began sweeping as if nothing had changed, when clearly everything had changed. And he was reminded vaguely of people going on about their business and saying, “If we don’t, we’re letting the terrorists win,” but this turned out to be only partially true. People always went on living after tragedy; it was an essential part of the human condition, a flaw in the argument of human exceptionalism, perhaps a strange kind of proof that God didn’t exist after all. There was nothing special about humans, they were born, ate, drank, and then died in one manner or another and other humans continued living. It was no amazing thing for people to go on trading stocks or flying across the country to appraise a set of antiques, or staying up until 2 A.M. to buy a set of China on QVC. No, the amazing thing was that the world stopped at all. And not unnecessary that was not what he was thinking. Frost had written a poem about it years ago, and certainly the Stoics and the Greeks must have had something to say about it as well. The untimely death of another is rarely the cause of your own death; it is merely a brief reminder of our insubstantial temporality.

The shoe maker felt, he was told, that making a particular type of shoe perfectly was his calling in the world, and to abandon that because of the onset of a war, or the killing of thousands of Jews would be silly. It was his job, as given to him by God, he believed, to make extremely fine shoes the likes of which could not be found in all the rest of Poland. And so he slowly fixed up the shop and started to make shoes for people who never came to his shop, and for all those people who didn’t really care about shoes anymore, who cared about things like bread and water and whether the Germans were ever going to leave, and all this time he worked feverishly on shoes, creating new types and varieties, the likes of which had never been seen. Shoes that would allow a man to walk on water, the likes of which had not been seen since the time of Christ; shoes that allowed a man to jump from the ground to the tops of houses. Shoes that allowed a man to float just above the surface of the ground, like Icarus wings, shoes that changed colors with the season and briefly bloomed in the late stages of spring with beautiful red flowers that the man had crossbred during the three years he spent working on his shoes, shoes that would remember to take you back home, such that a man could finally and fully enjoy a walk, take in his surroundings, enjoy the lovely bent neck of a woman, the fragrance of knockout roses, because his shoes would walk him home and deposit him on his door step without anyone the wiser.

This particular man’s family had been very close to him during the early stages of his career, had worked in the shop, and helped him test out new models of shoes, which he was constantly generating. The man’s wife had come from the landed gentry, and they’d sold the land so that he could pursue his dream of making shoes. And when they did, they were both happy because he was able to follow his dream, and she was able to support him. It really was the loving sort of relationship, though not without its problems, he snored terribly, and she sometimes fantasized about smothering him with a pillow if she was particularly tired, but she never did, and that seemed characteristic of the type of love that this couple shared for one another.