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I have to admit that I have been quite ambivalent about tools in the past.  On the one hand I have oggled at and admired beautifully made implements such as wood carving sets, billhooks, mattocks and the like. On the other I have been less than respectful about modern technology, the equipment that builds our cities, bridges and even spacecraft.  I can now see that they are all related and extensions of the first primitive poking stick or flint axe our ancestors used. 

As I type this on a keyboard, watching a screen and soon sending this off into the ether thousands of small inventions and innovations contribute to this effort that you are now reading.  Isn't that staggering?  A keyboard, a PC, an orbiting satellite, these are of course as much tools as are an inkpen, a palette or a lino-cutter.

The amazing thing is, and that is what I love about tools, that in tools function informs form, but doesn't dictate it completely.  A vase needs to be able to hold water, a pan needs to be able to cook food, but within those perimeters there is the scope to create a beautiful object, and so design is born, and therefore art.  

The prehistoric beaker people in NW Europe created beautifully shaped and ornamented pots thousands of years ago, but the ornamentation was surplus to requirement. No doubt the potters got joy out of it, and the consumers of the day enjoyed bringing beauty into their lives in the same way we do today.  Steve Jobs enjoyed adding beautiful fonts to his Apple Macs and we now enjoy the flexibility of a choice of typesets.  The continuity in humanity baffles me and is encouraging.

Ornamentation aside another wonderful thing about tools is that in many cases (but not all) functionality creates a beautiful object quite by chance.  An aeroplane looks a bit like a bird. An arrow needs to be balanced and stable to do its job.  A flint hand axe needs to be tear shaped.  And have you ever driven past an oil refinery in the dark? Ignoring pollution issues here for a moment, they are staggering pieces of modern art, but completely unintentional.  The wonders and paradoxes of civilisation....

 

Not lacking in friends or social life (in fact often feeling bad about not being able to keep up with people regularly) I quizzed myself over this attachment to being contacted, of being thought of by someone else.

There was a 50% chance that the message would be spam of course, but even so, why, I reflected (still watching the road....), do we enjoy being connected so much?  As it happens I do believe we're all connected anyway, and that the word "mankind" or "humanity" is more than a useful collective noun.  The thing is that most of the time, and through most of human history, we don't feel like that.  In fact, a lot of the time in our heads we set up petty differences and quarrels with others, artificially separating ourselves to bolster our identities.

To me however that doesn't take away from an underlying truth that we as mankind (and the wider universe come to that) are invisibly connected and ultimately one (One).  Modern technologies, starting with the mail service and the telegraph, increasingly are catching up with what is already and has always been so: one some level we are one.  The ping on my smartphone reminds me of that.  Isn't that great?